EVEN more than tempting liquors like tequila, tobacco is a pleasure that the Old World wishes it had never taken from the New. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus was met by tribesmen with “fruit, wooden spears and certain dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance”, he threw the last gift away. But his shipmates brought home the custom of sucking in the smoke, and the taste spread so rapidly that in 1604 King James I of England was prompted to issue a denunciation of the “manifold abuses of this vile custome”.

Vile indeed, but habit-forming and therefore lethally dangerous: it cuts short the lives of between a third and half of its practitioners. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), perhaps 100m people died prematurely during the 20th century as a result of tobacco, making it the leading preventable cause of death and one of the top killers overall. Another 1 billion more may die from it in this century if current trends continue unchecked.

In recent years smoking has been sharply restricted in some unlikely places. In 2004 Ireland amazed the world by successfully imposing a tobacco ban on all workplaces; and at the start of this year, France's café culture suddenly went smoke-free. The draconian curbs introduced by California in 1998 have been followed, at least in part, by well over half America's states. But the number of smokers in China, India and other developing countries is continuing to grow, as addiction spreads faster than information.

Hence the determination of almost everybody involved in global public health to escalate the war on smoking. Over 150 countries have already ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which requires countries to take a range of anti-smoking measures. Last July negotiators agreed on international norms for banning smoking in public places. Next week they meet in Geneva to discuss a protocol on tobacco smuggling.

In addition to new international rules, the WHO is pushing for aggressive policies at the national and local levels. On February 7th Margaret Chan, the WHO's director-general, and Michael Bloomberg, New York's zealously anti-smoking mayor, were due to unveil the most comprehensive survey of tobacco use ever carried out. The venue was fitting. Tom Frieden, the city's health commissioner, notes that the mayor's efforts have reduced smoking among the adults in New York by 20% and among teenagers in public schools by 50%. Mr Bloomberg's private charity, which supports many anti-smoking efforts worldwide, also funded the global survey, known as MPOWER.

The study is “a call to action to avoid a public-health catastrophe”, says Douglas Bettcher, head of the Tobacco Free Initiative at the WHO. The report lists the anti-smoking efforts of countries worldwide, offering benchmarks for aspiring reformers. What the survey shows, says Dr Bettcher, is that most countries have yet to implement even those policies that are proven to work.

The WHO says countries must do six related things. The first is to improve the quality of data on tobacco use. The second is to impose sweeping Irish-style smoking bans; only 5% of the global population is now covered by such curbs. The third is to intensify efforts to induce and assist smokers to drop the habit. Only nine countries offer the kind of well-funded, accessible programmes of which the WHO approves.

Those ideas concern the existing users of tobacco; another three are aimed at persuading people not to light up in the first place. It may be hard to believe, but the WHO insists that most smokers still do not understand the full extent of the health risks. It wants all countries to mandate large, grotesque pictorial warnings on cigarette packets. Another policy proven to work (in the handful of countries, representing 5% of the world's population, to have tried it) is a complete ban on marketing. The agency is adamant that “partial bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship do not work.”

The final prescription offered by the WHO is also the most powerful one: higher taxes. Studies show that raising tobacco taxes by a tenth may cause a 4% drop in consumption in rich countries and an 8% drop in poor ones, with tax revenue rising despite lower sales. The agency wants a 70% increase in the retail price of tobacco, which it says could prevent up to a quarter of all tobacco-related deaths worldwide. The claim is that higher taxes not only bring in revenue to fund anti-smoking efforts; they actually benefit the poor.

How come? A forthcoming paper by two scholars (Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Botond Koszegi of the University of California) notes that smokers face a familiar choice between short-term pleasure and a long-term desire to quit. Tobacco taxes are an incentive to make the right choice, and because the poor are price-sensitive, they benefit the most. Indeed, the authors calculate that in the United States, “the monetary value of the health damage from a pack of cigarettes is over $35 for the average smoker, implying both that optimal taxes should be very large and that cigarette taxes are likely progressive.”

The practical argument for action is simpler: the tobacco industry is getting the world's poor hooked before governments can respond. In recent years, as rich countries have clamped down on smoking, tobacco firms have shifted their focus to poorer places. A study by Britain's Bath University found that by using aggressive tactics, such as targeting women, international tobacco firms had helped to double smoking rates in Russia since 1991.

The tobacco industry is regrouping in order to focus on “promising” markets and escape the pesky lawsuits it is likely to face in rich, litigious countries. For example, Altria, a global tobacco concern based in the United States, plans to spin off Philip Morris International as a stand-alone foreign entity in late March. China is now home to more than a quarter of the world's smokers; it will soon be manufacturing Marlboro cigarettes for Philip Morris, and the firm will be exporting Chinese tobacco to other countries.

At times, the strategy used by public-health campaigners may seem heavy-handed; they retort that nothing else can work against a rich adversary. Indeed, Dr Bettcher argues that just as mosquitoes convey malaria, Big Tobacco is the “vector spreading this epidemic”. And eradicating tobacco may prove every bit as hard as fighting insect-borne disease.