THIS Sunday marks exactly 11 years since Scotland introduced a ban on smoking in public places.

Since then, legislation has also been passed to ban smoking in cars where children are present and to outlaw smoking in hospital grounds.

More recently, there have been calls to prohibit smoking in any area mainly used by children - such as school playgrounds or playparks.

Scotland, perpetually labelled the 'Sick Man of Europe', was the first of the UK nations to enact a smoking ban when it came into force on March 26 2006.

Research found that there was a 17 per cent decrease in hospital admissions for patients suffering a heart attack during the first year following the ban, while a Glasgow study linked a 10 per cent reduction in Scotland's premature birth rate to the smokefree laws.

Overall, the number of smokers in Scotland by 20 per cent in the first decade after the ban - evidence that making an unhealthy habit not only socially unacceptable, but inconvenient, was an effective tool in deterring it.

This week, a study by the prestigious Lancet journal evaluated how effective a range of tobacco control interventions had been in reducing smoking rates around the world.

The five measures - high tobacco taxes, smoke-free public spaces, warning labels, comprehensive advertising bans, and support for stop smoking services - underpinned the World Health Organisation's 'Framework Convention on Tobacco Control', which came into effect in 2005 and spurred governments around the globe to pursue smoking bans.

Of the 126 countries studied by the Lancet, smoke-free public spaces were the most widely enforced measure, adopted by 35 nations. Advertising bans - which research has shown reduce the number of people starting smoking, especially young people - were the least implemented of the five anti-tobacco measures.

In Scotland, and the UK, all five are routine policies, although other nations go further. In Bosnia, for example, taxes make up 86 per cent of the retail price of a packet of cigarettes compared to 16.5 per cent in the UK.

Panama introduced a complete smoke-free policy - including outside dining areas or balconies - and a complete ban on advertising, promotion and sponsorship in 2008, and established a strong quit assistance program in 2009. Its hardline approach has helped it achieve the world's fastest decline in smoking prevalence, with the number of smokers in Panama falling 57 per cent between 2000 and 2015.

Overall, the Lancet study concluded that the "highest-level implementations" of the five measures were "significantly associated with a decrease in smoking prevalence": in other words, the tougher the enforcement, the better the results.

So while smoking rates increased in Africa, where few of the anti-tobacco measures were introduced, Northern Europe and South America led the way and reaped the benefits.

While the authors note that there is an element of the "chicken-and-egg problem" in developed nations - that is, "how much of their policy adoption represents a political response to the already-decreasing status of smoking, rather than a cause of it?" - the evidence still demonstrates that so-called "nanny state" interventions can work.

The big question now has to be how we turn the lessons learned from smoking to an even bigger public health crisis: obesity.