The European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP) provided a grant to Luk Joossens for a project to measure tobacco control activity at country level in Europe. A questionnaire was drafted then finalised with feedback from a panel of ten experts, international tobacco control researchers and specialists. In 2004, the questionnaire was sent to correspondents in 28 European countries who had agreed to fill in their country data.

Although the original intention of the project was simply to describe current tobacco control policies in Europe, it seemed worthwhile trying to quantify these policies to be able to compare countries systematically. However, while there was evidence which told us broadly which tobacco control measures was effective, it was not easy to decide what weight should be given to each policy measure in a scale. Ideally this would have been decided by the size of the effect of a policy measure, but relatively little rigorous research on the effectiveness of tobacco control policy existed at the time, and such research that did exist was not precise enough to permit easy comparisons between countries. Therefore, to score the questionnaire and create the scale we had to assign scores to each tobacco control policy. To do this we convened an international panel of ten experts to agree the allocation of points to the scale.