IELTS vocabulary: Public Health — Smoking and Alcohol

Smoking and alcohol appear regularly as a Task 2 subtopic of health, often framed as a question about whether governments should regulate or tax harmful substances, whether advertising bans work, or whether personal freedom should limit public health policy. The trap is specific to this topic: because everyone already has an opinion on smoking and drinking, candidates reach for the same handful of phrases — "it's bad for your health," "the government should ban it," "people should be more responsible" — and never get past that first, obvious layer. An examiner has read that exact sentence hundreds of times. What actually earns marks here is vocabulary that engages with the mechanics of addiction and the mechanics of policy: what specifically makes a substance hard to quit, and which specific lever a government is pulling when it intervenes. This article works through both halves.

Start with the behaviour itself, since precise description of the problem is what a body paragraph needs before it can propose anything. "Substance use" is the neutral, clinical umbrella term for consuming tobacco, alcohol, or other regulated substances — deliberately non-judgemental, and a safer default than "substance abuse," which implies a harmful, compulsive pattern rather than simply describing use. "Nicotine addiction" names the specific chemical dependency driving continued tobacco use even against a smoker's own stated wishes, distinct from habit in the looser sense. "Binge drinking" is consuming a large quantity of alcohol in a short period, typically defined by health bodies as a set number of drinks within roughly two hours — a term worth using instead of the vaguer "drinking too much," since it names a specific, measurable pattern. "Underage drinking" and "underage smoking" are the standard phrases for consumption below a legal minimum age, and "secondhand smoke" (smoke inhaled involuntarily by non-smokers nearby) is the term that lets an essay argue smoking harms more than just the smoker.

"Substance dependency" is a useful step up from "addiction" in formal writing, describing the broader physical and psychological reliance a person develops on a substance over time, while "withdrawal symptoms" names the physical and psychological effects of stopping use, which is precisely why quitting is difficult even when someone is genuinely motivated to. "Alcohol-related disease" (liver disease, certain cancers, and cardiovascular conditions linked to long-term drinking) and "smoking-related illness" let an essay name a category of health consequence without listing every condition individually, which keeps a sentence controlled rather than turning into a list.

Regulation vocabulary is where these essays typically go thin, defaulting to "the government should ban it" without naming which lever is actually being pulled — and a strong essay names the mechanism, since different mechanisms have genuinely different effects and trade-offs. "Advertising restrictions" limit how and where tobacco or alcohol can be marketed, while "plain packaging" (removing branding and colour from cigarette packets, leaving only standardised warnings) is a more specific, and genuinely testable, policy example. "Minimum purchase age" restricts sale by age rather than by price or availability, whereas "minimum unit pricing" sets a legal floor price per unit of alcohol regardless of brand or discount, targeting the cheapest, highest-strength products specifically. "Sin tax" is a tax on goods considered harmful to health or society — tobacco and alcohol being the standard examples — intended to discourage consumption while also raising revenue; it's worth noting this tax is often criticised as "regressive," meaning it takes a proportionally larger share of income from lower earners, since consumption doesn't scale with income. "Health warning labels" and "public health campaign" cover the informational rather than financial or legal side of intervention, and "drink-driving legislation" is the specific regulatory area combining alcohol policy with road safety, a genuinely separate argument from health harm alone.