Once home to the world’s heaviest smokers, Southeast Asia has cut tobacco use by over 40% since 2010, especially among men. Public health campaigns, advertising bans, and education have reduced the smoking rates by immeasurable amounts. Although things in Southeast Asia are looking up, challenges remain. Products such as smokeless tobacco and vaping devices continue to endanger communities and the youth, thus exposing the limits in regulation and health policy.
Southeast Asia has accomplished a once-thought-impossible feat and achieved a large-scale decline in tobacco use among all ages and genders. Mathew Ward Agius, a journalist and writer for Deutsche Welle, gave praise to the country’s new and improved framework of global health governance and attributed it to the drastic drop in tobacco use. Southeast Asia is now one of only three regions on track to meet the global target of a 30% reduction in tobacco use administered by the World Health Organization.
The central issue discussed in Agius’s article is the dramatic reduction of tobacco use in Southeast Asia and the region’s ongoing challenge of controlling smokeless and emerging nicotine products. Once the world’s heaviest-smoking region, Southeast Asia has achieved a 40 percent decline in use since 2010. The piece explores how coordinated government policies, advertising bans, high taxation, school education, and media messaging have changed public behavior while warning that e-cigarettes and chewing tobacco still threaten public health.
Those most affected by this issue are the region’s men, youth, and lower-income populations. Historically, smoking in Southeast Asia was tied to masculinity, labor identity, and affordability. Because tobacco-related disease disproportionately harms these groups, the decline in use represents a major public-health victory. Yet, the persistence of smokeless tobacco affects both men and women, particularly in rural and informal-economy settings where regulation is weak.
Agius situates the story within a broader historical and geographic context of global tobacco control. He references the World Health Organization’s 2010 goal to cut tobacco use by 30 percent by 2025, explaining that Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Americas are the only regions on track to meet it. This context reveals how post-2000 globalization of health governance and regional cooperation have shaped Southeast Asia’s policies. The article also notes that cigarettes once dominated consumption, but cultural and economic shifts now make smokeless products and vaping the new frontier of the epidemic.
DW represents a Western, institutional public-health perspective that emphasizes evidence-based governance and WHO frameworks. This orientation highlights policy success and quantitative progress, sometimes at the expense of cultural nuance or local resistance to top-down reforms. The framing encourages readers to view tobacco control primarily as a technocratic achievement rather than a complex social transformation.
The accompanying photograph of a hand holding a burning cigarette against a darkened background visually symbolizes both personal habit and structural control. The contrast between light and shadow isolates the act of smoking, drawing the viewer’s attention to the danger and immediacy of tobacco use. By focusing on the cigarette rather than a full person, the image universalizes the issue, creating a sense of urgency while avoiding stigmatizing any particular group. This visual restraint reinforces the article’s broader message of collective responsibility and progress.
Source: ‘No smoking’ in Southeast Asia: A region quits tobacco – DW – 10/13/2025