My friend and former work colleague Kevin Molloy, who has died from lung cancer aged 63, was a true champion of the harm reduction approach to public health, latterly as head of the Global Tobacco Harm Reduction Scholarship Programme, which aims to build research capacity into tobacco harm reduction and to raise awareness of the implications of that research for public health policy. Born in Great Barr in Birmingham to Jean (nee Barrett), a housewife, and her husband, Valentine Molloy, a foundryman, he gained a scholarship to the local King Edward’s school and then attended the University of East Anglia, where he studied English and drama. In his late teens he had begun using heroin, and he continued the habit well into his 20s, dealing drugs to maintain his use. This eventually led to a prison sentence for importation. Shortly after his release he was rearrested and sentenced to another six months. On his second release he returned to his family, but his struggles with heroin continued and led to a period about which he had regrets. Eventually, however, he decided to go into rehab and after successfully kicking his habit, in 1990, he took up acting classes and there met Anne Lynch, a performing arts lecturer, whom he married in 1998. In 1991 Kevin began working as a counsellor at the Roma Drug Project in London, where he had done his own rehab. There he gradually progressed to positions of greater responsibility and completed an Open University MBA while he and Anne were both working and bringing up two young children. In 2000-01 he was drug action team co-ordinator for Medway council in Kent before becoming director of operations at the charity Addaction until 2005 and then taking on the same role at the Kent Council on Addictions (2005-12). Thereafter he was a freelance consultant until 2018, when he was appointed to head the Global Tobacco Harm Reduction Scholarship Programme, run by Knowledge-Action-Change, a private-sector public health agency. It was there that his accumulated knowledge, experience and wisdom coalesced most obviously, as he worked with scholars and practitioners from across the world to hone their ideas into workable projects with measurable results. A sought-after speaker at conferences, he had also by then become a member of the Drugs, Alcohol and Justice cross-party parliamentary group. As a work colleague Kevin was all that could be wished for. Even after his diagnosis of cancer, he continued to work through illness and to cope with a punishing treatment schedule while remaining a caring, concerned, wise and funny man. He is survived by Anne, their children, Lottie and Jake, and his mother.