Chapter 2 Resources

Action on Smoking and Health organizes webinars regularly to inform stakeholders and activists about policy initiatives related to ending tobacco consumption globally.

WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 30, 2025 – Today, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) released the 2025 U.S. Tobacco Industry Interference Index, a biennial report detailing the extent to which decisionmakers in the U.S. are influenced by tobacco industry manipulations. The U.S. ranked 98 out of 100 countries surveyed, its worst rank since the report was first published in 2019.

After 10 days of talks, diplomats from 180 countries were unable to break their deadlock to finalize the world’s first treaty on plastic pollution in Geneva, Switzerland.

The summit, held at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, ended after an all-night contentious session on August 15, 2025.

According to Laurant Huber, Executive Director of Action on Smoking & Health,

“This breakdown is a direct result of the UN Environment Program’s failure to address conflicts of interest, allowing heavy interference from industry. ASH and our partners worked tirelessly to push back, pressing to keep the world’s most-littered plastic item — cigarette butts — on the treaty’s banned items list. . .

ASH will leverage another UN treaty — the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control — meeting this November, to keep fighting for a global ban on cigarette filters and stronger protections for health and the environment.”

In the book Merchants of Doubt and in this video, Naomi Oreskes explained how corporations and proponents of a “neoliberal” political ideology (that discourages government regulation) created doubt about both tobacco science and climate science. The same scientists (funded by conservative organizations) who caused people to doubt whether tobacco causes illness also convinced people that burning fossil fuels has not warmed the planet.

Sent by Kelsey Romeo-Stuppy: This week, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a Report on “Eliminating Tobacco-Related Disease and Death: Addressing Disparities.” This is the 35th Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health since 1964, a series of instrumental reports that inspired the name of our organization: Action on Smoking and Health. 

ASH welcomes this report, which is written by Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, with many contributors including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and numerous highly-respected academics and scientists. ASH’s programs seek to address the issues directly highlighted in the Surgeon General’s report, so much so that our key issues were highlighted in the Overview that the Surgeon General’s office published. 

“Cigarette filters are the world’s leading source of trash and the leading source of plastic pollution. Globally, approximately 4.5 trillion used filters – or butts – are discarded into the environment every year. Filters are non-biodegradable and cannot be feasibly collected or recycled.”

https://ash.org/santa-cruz-countys-first-in-the-world-cigarette-filter-ban/