“Daddy, What’s a Cigarette?” The Relevance of Tobacco Control for Universal Norms of Gambling Regulation

Abstract Like tobacco, gambling is a risky, urge-driven lifestyle choice with serious health, social and economic consequences, while simultaneously representing a lucrative global industry shaped by powerful commercial interests. In 2024, the Lancet Public Health Commission on Gambling called for public health-motivated interventions in gambling activity, including prohibitions or restrictions on “ … access, promotion, marketing, and sponsorship.” As the first set of universal norms to govern a lifestyle risk, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (‘FCTC’) has set a benchmark for universal population-led public health norms that address the sale and supply of tobacco products. To investigate the potential for transposition of the FCTC’s model to gambling, this paper examines the critical strategies of tobacco control norms. It evaluates them against the features of gambling regulation, taking a first step towards examining the “fit” of the FCTC as a normative model for common, internationally agreed public health-motivated measures of gambling control. It finds that while some normative elements may be transferable from tobacco control, fundamental differences between the highly targeted interventions of tobacco law and the broader regulatory objectives of gambling control frameworks make a direct transposition of norms problematic.