According to an editorial, while the characteristics of young people are unlikely to vary substantially between North America and England, the policy environment is substantially different. England has introduced a ban on most forms of e-cigarette marketing and limits on nicotine concentration in vapour products. It notes that research is ongoing in all three countries, but more is needed to understand the relation between the use of these products and other relevant developments such as the legalisation of cannabis in Canada and parts of the US.
This research paper is one of three in The BMJ examining smoking and efforts to deal with it.
The second paper describe a new open access dataset, the International Cigarette Consumption Database (ICCD) of 71 countries where reliable data were available from 1970 to 2015 on cigarette consumption. It identified a decline in cigarette consumption per capita in most countries in the past three decades, but also substantial increases in China and Indonesia, and a doubling of consumption in Russia in the years immediately after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
The third paper used the ICCD to evaluate the impact of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), an international treaty adopted in 2003 that required its 181 signatories to implement evidence based measures for tobacco control. The researchers found that the FCTC had not accelerated existing declines in consumption overall, but they did find highly variable patterns. High income countries saw large reductions in smoking, but low and middle income countries and Asian countries increased cigarette consumption per capita.