Special effects: tobacco policies and low socioeconomic status girls and women

Tobacco use is a global public health problem of epic proportion, which threatens to kill one of two smokers and harm many non-smokers along the way. The World Health Organisation views both tobacco use and tobacco production as a dire threat to world health, contributing to early death, chronic diseases, poverty, environmental degradation, and labour exploitation.1 Tobacco use has typically been patterned along gender and class lines, with higher class males typically beginning to smoke before females and those in lower socioeconomic classes.2–4

In developed countries, there have been great successes in tobacco control, reducing rates of smoking by half in countries such as the USA, Canada, Sweden, Australia, and the United Kingdom over the past 40 years. These achievements reflect the success of the comprehensive tobacco policy approach, linking several key regulatory and legal policies together in the effort to reduce tobacco use. These policies include taxation, limits on advertising and sponsorship, restrictions on smoking locations, and prohibitions of sales to children. However, despite these successes, declining rates of tobacco use at the population level may mask high rates and persistent health issues for many disadvantaged groups, such as women and girls of low socioeconomic status (SES), within the same societies.

The combination of three issues, gender, class, and tobacco policy, coalesce to underpin this special supplement of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. In particular, the authors of this issue, its funders, the National Cancer Institute and the American Legacy Foundation, and its sponsor, the Tobacco Research Network on Disparities (TReND), are concerned with the effects of comprehensive tobacco policies on low SES girls …