The image on the cover of the new report, Fighting The Last War: The Who and International Tobacco Control, is a distillation of that war.
On one side is a mass of menacing, angry orange and yellow smoke; on the other, a cool-white cloud of fluorescent vapor. The unmistakable message: Smoke kills, vapor saves.
For readers interested in how international tobacco control groups function on a granular level, one of the first sections deconstructs in plain language the complicated intersectionality of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Conference of the Parties and tobacco control NGOs. The report explains, “The main policy engine driving the international effort to combat the smoking epidemic is the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which entered into force in 2005. This enabled the creation of the Conference of the Parties (COP), regular meetings which bring together delegations of government representatives who discuss the implementation of FCTC measures.”
The next session of the Conference of the Parties to the WHO FCTC (COP9) takes place in November. Tobacco harm reduction is not explicitly on the agenda, despite loud calls for its adoption.
Helen Redmond – Filter – 2021-10-28.
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