Clive Bates has had a diverse career in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Starting out with IBM, he then switched career to work in the environment movement. From 1997-2003 he was Director of Action on Smoking and Health (UK), campaigning to reduce the harms caused by tobacco. In 2003 he joined Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit as a civil servant and worked in senior roles in the public sector and for the United Nations in Sudan. He is now Director of The Counterfactual, a consulting and advocacy practice focussed on a pragmatic approach to sustainability and public health.

Fiona Patten was a member of the Victorian parliament from 2014 to 2022. She campaigned on harm reduction policies for 30 years and ran the Australian adult industry association (Eros) for 20 years. She initiated and delivered reforms including voluntary assisted dying, abortion law reform, the decriminalisation of sex work and drug law reform. Since leaving parliament she has continued to work on social reform issues including criminal justice reform, regulating adult use of cannabis, access to medicinal cannabis, drug harm reduction including for tobacco, and a greater separation of church and state. She currently sits on a variety of health and justice boards. Fiona is passionate about tobacco harm reduction and constantly disappointed with her own country’s approach to it. In 2018 she published her autobiography -‘Sex, Drugs and the Electoral Roll’. She is the owner of a registered wildlife sanctuary.

Marc Gunther is a veteran reporter whose interests include philanthropy, tobacco control, drug policy and psychedelic medicines. He began writing about vaping in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2021 with a story headlined Bloomberg’s Millions Funded an Effective Campaign Against Vaping: Could It Do More Harm Than Good? His coverage continues at The Great Vape Debate on Medium.

Marc was a senior writer at Fortune magazine from 1996 to 2008. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and Mother Jones. 

A graduate of Yale University, Marc lives in Bethesda, MD.