Health experts urge fundamental reforms in WHO tobacco control

Public health experts called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to reform its approach to tobacco control and acknowledge harm reduction as a better approach to assist more than a billion smokers worldwide.

- 

A panel organized by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) described the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control's (FCTC) two decades of tobacco control efforts as stagnant, characterized by missed opportunities and a risky opposition to innovation.

Roger Bate, a global health policy expert at the International Center for Law and Economics, said that "whether it's COVID-19 or tobacco policy, the WHO has failed repeatedly."

"We need fundamental reform. If the organization cannot evolve to incorporate modern science and real-world solutions, then it risks becoming obsolete," he said.

Martin Cullip, international fellow at TPA's Consumer Center, said the FCTC was a "good idea that has gone terribly wrong."

"We've lost 20 years of potential progress because of rigid ideology," he said.

The WHO marked the 20th anniversary of FCTC in February 2025. The global health treaty, signed by 183 countries, heavily promotes its MPOWER strategy, which emphasizes measures like taxation, advertising bans and smoking restrictions.

"The WHO has always been a political organization. It has always been driven by its Geneva bureaucracy," Bate said.