The five countries we have focused on here France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States share a broad commitment to liberal political values yet they differ in important ways” Two are common law and two are civil law states. Japan is a “mixed” system; The US and Germany are federal systems. France, the United Kingdom and Japan are unitary. Yet despite these differences and those that characterized their first encounters with tobacco they now reflect a broad convergence on the most effective public policy responses to smoking related morbidity and mortality.