Smoking is the number one preventable cause of death and disease in the world, according to the World Health Organization Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic.
This has been known for some time but the responses of governments to this problem have varied enormously. Many countries, which now have comprehensive tobacco control regimes, did very little to regulate tobacco until the 1980s. Further, many countries still have very limited tobacco controls.
West Virginia University political science professor Donley Studlar has co-authored the book, “Global Tobacco Control: Power, Policy, Governance and Transfer”; which raises two key questions: Is there often a wide gap between the size of the policy problem and the government response? And why, if the problem is the same across the globe, does policy vary so markedly across political systems?
This is the first major book by political scientists explaining global tobacco control policy. It identifies a history of minimal tobacco control, linked to the power of the tobacco industry. Then, it charts the extent to which governments, aided by public health advocates, have regulated tobacco domestically and internationally in the modern era.
Studlar co-authored “Global Tobacco Control” with WVU alumnus Hadii M. Mamudu, Ph.D., assistant professor of public health at East Tennessee State University and Paul Cairney, Ph.D., senior lecturer and head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom.
The book has already been released in the U.K. and was released in January in the United States.
Donley Studlar is an Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of Political Science at WVU and has published four books and more than 125 articles on comparative politics in journals all over the world. His previous book on this topic is “Tobacco Control: Comparative Politics in the United States and Canada.”
For more information, contact Donley Studlar, professor of political science, at (304) 293-3811 ext. 5269 or Donley.Studlar@mail.wvu.edu
-WVU-
cs/01/31/12
Check http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/ daily for the latest news from the University.
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.