The sharp drop in the number of smokers in the UK over the past 40 years, and England’s leading role in the global smoking cessation movement, owe much to the research work of Martin Raw, who has died of pulmonary fibrosis aged 73.
Millions of smokers will have been prompted and supported to quit thanks to Raw’s findings and advocacy. He was lead author of England’s first evidence-based guidelines on how to treat tobacco dependence, in 1998, which led to the creation of a national network of NHS smoking cessation services that continue today and that have been emulated by many countries across the world.
His international influence was reflected in his appointment in 2010 to lead, on behalf of the UK government, a working group of 36 countries to draft cessation guidelines for a UN health treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The guidelines represent official World Health Organization (WHO) policy and have since been adopted by more than 170 countries.
A clinical psychologist by training, Raw joined the Addiction Research Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in the mid-1970s after finding that a hands-on role at St George’s hospital did not suit him. He worked with the unit’s smokers’ clinic and in 1982 co-authored the first clinical trial showing that nicotine gum was effective in helping people to quit. From 1989 to 1995, he was deputy editor of the scientific journal Addiction, and then became a freelance consultant for the rest of his career.
Raw, who never smoked, was closely involved in the conception of National No Smoking Day (NNSD), inaugurated in the UK on Ash Wednesday 1984, when the prevalence of smoking among adults was 33%. By 2022, the proportion of adults using cigarettes had fallen to just below 13%, although surveys suggest that about one in 12 adults now vapes. Tobacco remains the leading cause of death and disease within an individual’s control.
As well as campaigns such as NNSD and the work of the NHS services, cigarette use has been curbed by the banning in 2003 of advertising and sponsorship, the ban on smoking in enclosed workspaces and public places introduced in 2007, the stopping of retail displays in 2015 and the introduction of plain packaging a year later.
An estimated 80% of the world’s 1.3 billion smokers are now found in low- and middle-income countries, to where Raw increasingly turned his focus. He helped develop smoking cessation programmes in Uruguay, Bolivia, Mexico, Turkey, Tunisia and South Africa, among many others. Since 2003, he had divided his time between homes in the UK and Brazil, although for more than two years from 2016 he lived in the US, where he was a visiting professor at New York University. He had recently been working in Jordan, Fiji and the Pacific island of Palau.
In 2015, Raw set up the International Centre for Tobacco Cessation and was its director. Although the centre attracted initial funding, support ebbed as key funders chose increasingly to prioritise smoking prevention rather than cessation. Raw nevertheless continued to use the centre’s brand to produce country situation analyses and to recommend tools to support cessation programmes.
He was the author of eight books and more than 50 research papers. His publications included a number of self-help guides for smokers, including the popular How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped in 2000 for the Kick the Habit campaign that ran across the BBC.
In the 1990s he also co-wrote a number of articles about tobacco smuggling, which influenced WHO action under the framework convention, and about EU tobacco subsidies, revealing economic inefficiency and fraud. The European Court of Auditors was prompted to act on subsidies and EU reforms, agreed in 2004, began to phase out payments for tobacco growers.
Raw was born in Bath, Somerset, the fourth of the five children of the Rev William Raw, a Baptist pastor, then a chaplain with the RAF, and Margaret (nee Bunting), who had been a secretary before their marriage. The family lived in the Cotswold village of Colerne, Wiltshire, where Raw enjoyed an idyllic rural childhood playing in woods and fields and helping out on local farms.
Educated at Taunton school, which was then a boarding school for boys of nonconformist families, he went on to Lincoln College, Oxford, from where he graduated in 1972 with a degree in psychology, philosophy and physiology (PPP), taking psychology and physiology. He was awarded a PhD in 1985 while at the Institute of Psychiatry.
He first met his future wife, Monica Sabino, in Brazil in 1992 when he was giving a lecture in Salvador. They met again and began a relationship in London when she was researching the history of board games at the British Museum. They married in 2000 and moved three years later to Brazil, where Raw became a visiting professor at the Federal University of São Paulo.
Raw’s contributions to public health were recognised in 2012 by the American Cancer Society, which bestowed its prestigious Luther Terry award upon him, and in 2017 by the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, which gave him its John Slade award.
In the UK, Raw and one of his siblings, Philip, clubbed together to buy and renovate a cottage in Buckden, North Yorkshire, where he returned to his rural roots.
He loved walking in the Dales, drinking and gossiping in the pub, taking and endlessly cataloguing photographs – New York water towers and seagulls on rooftops were specialties – listening to Irish folk music and supporting Liverpool football club.
He is survived by Monica.
• Martin Thomas Donald Raw, smoking cessation researcher, born 22 May 1950; died 13 April 2024
