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Something good has happened in Ghana these past 20 years which we ought to be trumpeting across the globe. Unfortunately, despite the gargantuan scale of this achievement, it has passed almost unnoticed, and this is because it has happened without much effort by our governments. I am referring to the near elimination of cigarette smoking as a habit among Ghanaians. I don�t have any figures to go by, but I don�t think the evidence of my own senses can be undermined by the absence of statistics but that is why I carefully said �near� and not complete elimination of smoking. When I was young and growing up in this country, most self-respecting men about town smoked cigarettes. There was no question about it. The habit was picked up in school dormitories where it was seen as a macho and defiant thing to do. It got up the noses of puritanical seniors and housemasters who were there to be mocked and defied. The habit was reinforced by massive advertising. Again, without any statistics at hand, it would be fair to say that a significant part of advertising income for newspapers, radio and television came from the tobacco industry and tobacco money sponsored major public events including the Miss Ghana pageant. Today, smoking is a minority activity, although there is much smoking of cigarettes and other substances at several specific areas, including Accra�s beachfront where the hardcore try to keep the tobacco industry in profit. By and large, however, smoking in public places, and perhaps as a personal habit, has dropped to the point where the most-telling evidence is the closure of the two cigarette factories in Ghana. I don�t know how this dramatic feat was achieved because it bucks the trend in developing countries and also in China and the rest of Asia, where smoking is on the rise. However, I don�t think behaviour change has anything to do with government policy or anti-tobacco advocacy. Of course, every now and then, especially on World Anti-Smoking Day, a few tame noises are made by government agencies and officials but in the main, our governments prefer to stay clear of �social� issues, especially where personal choices are involved. This attitudes of our governments is very strange because across the world, people tend to complain about too much rather than too little government �interference� in the personal lives and choices. Here, the government prefers to stick to the provision of �infrastructure� as if that is the only means by which human progress and happiness can be secured. The fact that �infrastructure� is only a means to a desired end has been ignored; governments boast of providing schools and not education, hospitals and not health because it is easier to count the countable parts of our lives while ignoring the unquantifiable aspects which rather determine the real quality of our lives. For example, the drop in smoking may account for more improvements in our overall health than in the number of CHIPS compounds built over the last several years. Naturally, there are people who are against any government advocacy in matters of �choice�. Such people may be part of the industry or perhaps are ideological libertarians who believe that what we eat or drink is none of the government�s business. The fallacy is that it is the government�s business because in the end, it is our tax money that will be used to cure any ills that arise from those personal �choices�. I put the word �Choice� in quotes because often there is no choice in what we put into our bodies despite the propaganda to the contrary. For example, cigarette advertising used to be so pervasively associated with glamour and machismo that most young males �chose� the smoking path without really knowing what they were doing to their bodies because neither the industry nor the government provided any real information about the effects of smoking. Here is another example: today, sugar has been identified as a major cause of serious illness and death. It has been described as the �new tobacco�, implying that governments ought to regulate its use and provide information in the same way as was done on tobacco, especially in Europe, the US and the rest of the West. Unfortunately, our government is silent on this issue although the evidence is in the public domain and the tools of advocacy and regulation are all too well known. It could be an issue of choice for someone to eat or not eat sugar but the amount of sugar that goes into prepared food for sale to the public, especially children, ought to be regulated. Look at it this way: already, some countries have regulated the amount of sugar that should be in fizzy drinks and fruit juices. In some countries, the sugar has been reduced to ZERO which is why it is possible to buy, for example, �zero coke� which is manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company in some countries. Why can�t our government make similar regulations here? I am using the sugar issue to highlight the need for more consistent and modern approach to how government regulation can and should be used to improve our quality of life and life choices. Here, anything that appears to be in the �personal� or �private� domain is left to its own devices no matter how much it can hurt people. Let me give a couple of examples: no one knows the number of hours commercial drivers drive and yet there is massive evidence to suggest that driving beyond a certain amount of time, especially at night, leads to accidents. I have personally investigated the number of hours tro-tro drivers do and concluded that perhaps a majority of them have as little as four hours sleep per night while they drive for a minimum of 15 to 18 hours a day almost without break. It is not that they enjoy long working hours but they need to drive for that long every day in order to meet the demands set by the vehicle owners. Is it any wonder that the way tro-tro drivers do their business they endanger their lives, their passengers and other road users EVERY MINUTE OF THE DAY? Think about haulage �articulator� drivers who spend days without rest on our roads, and yet, almost 60 years after independence, and with real information at our disposal, this is a completely unregulated activity that claims lives every day. While the Tobinco-FDA saga was raging on, I wondered why the irony appeared to be lost on us: while the FDA was being tough, and rightly so, on importers of medicines, people up and down the country were taking unapproved bitters and other herbal preparations of their choice without any inhibition. In fact, it appears that there is nothing stopping anyone in this country from gathering any dry leaves, giving them a vigorous shake in alcohol and a fancy name and voila !� they could be in the �herbal medicine� business. We need to strengthen both regulation and public education on health and safety issues not only in a selective manner but across the broad sweep of the government oversight and policy prescriptions. Above all, however, the government must make use of the latest information to improve the quality of life of our citizens. The fight against �sugar-borne� diseases will be harder than the one against tobacco because sugar is sweet and manufacturers of sugary drinks, for example, exploit this quality to entice more and more people to get hooked to this �drug�. The moral case against sugar may be as strong as it is for tobacco but it will not be easy to persuade people that this sweet substance is bad for them. This is why we need the machinery of state to drive such a campaign. In the end, our health may be better guaranteed through such a campaign than cutting sods for an ultra-modern hospital in every district capital.