The Tobacco Endgame: History, Headwinds, and the Horizon

Ruth E. Malone, RN, PhD is Professor Emerita of Nursing and Health Policy, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco. She is internationally known for her research and analysis on the policy dynamics of tobacco control and has published widely on the tobacco endgame. Since she first used the term “endgame” to characterize new supply-side policy proposals in a 2010 editorial, the idea that an endgame for the commercial tobacco epidemic is possible has gained global traction. In work funded by the National Cancer Institute and the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, and in projects funded by the California Tobacco Prevention Program, she and her team contributed key research and analytic papers to the tobacco endgame literature and developed resources to help communities and programs working on endgame initiatives. She is a member of the California Endgame Advisory Council and has served as an expert panel member for the forthcoming WHO FCTC report on forward-looking measures that might be implemented by countries at advanced stages of tobacco regulation. From 2009 through 2023 she served as Editor-in-Chief of the leading international policy journal in the field, Tobacco Control, published by BMJ Journals.