There are over 1.2 billion tobacco users in the world, most in developing countries. Once a problem primarily in high-income countries, disease and death from tobacco use has increasingly become a burden for developing countries as well. The tobacco epidemic is one of the leading causes of preventable death and disability. However, mitigating the devastating health damage caused by tobacco use is made especially difficult by nicotine's powerfully addictive properties, low prices of tobacco products, and the constant, often subtle reinforcement of social norms and encouragement to smoke through billions of dollars of advertising each year. This work contains the stories of six countries - Brazil, Bangladesh, Canada, Poland, South Africa, and Thailand. These countries, selected to provide global representation, are in different stages of the tobacco epidemic and the strength and history of their tobacco control policies vary considerably. This work relates the strategies, success stories and setbacks in developing tobacco control policies in order to assist people grappling with similar issues in other countries.