Partisanship is a terrible development for our culture. But it's even worse for areas such as public health, because people die when we implement bad, partisan ideas.
harm reduction
In service of their ideological agenda, the "abstinence-only" nicotine religion is perfectly happy to withhold potentially life-saving e-cigarettes from smokers. If a few million smokers have to die along the way, those are casualties they're willing to accept in pursuit of their nicotine-free utopia.
Commissioner Scott Gottlieb believes that his FDA should be in the business of getting smokers to transition away from cigarettes, to something less harmful like e-cigarettes or other products. That's similar to the policy taken by the UK's National Health Service, and it's precisely in line with ACSH's policy stance of harm reduction.
Philadelphia has a program to provide drug users with clean needles, a safe site to inject and referrals for treatment and social services – a first in the United States. But before we accept or reject the mainstream narratives, let's consider some of the evidence municipal lawmakers studied before taking this action.
A new computer algorithm may reduce the radiation we receive from medical imaging by a lot. But should we worry about the harmful effects of radiation we receive during medical testing?
New research finds no significant health differences between vapers and non-vapers. However, the sample size was very small, so the results should be considered preliminary.
Researchers from Georgetown University recently published a study in the journal Tobacco Control demonstrating the potential to save millions of people from premature smoking-related deaths by switching to e-cigarette use.
E-cigarettes are "effective in helping people quit smoking" and "95% safer than smoking."* Additionally, there are "no health risks to bystanders."
What evil, conniving, greedy, Big Tobacco-loving, propaganda-spewing group of shills says that? The UK's National Health Service (NHS).
The King County Health Department, which serves mostly the city of Seattle and its suburbs, has recently earned a reputation for being driven by politics rather than by evidence-based medicine or common sense.
The FDA announced new regulations on tobacco products — some good, some not so great. We'd like to see the data supporting the idea that lowering the nicotine level in cigarettes would be less addictive. But we applaud the move to give tobacco manufacturers more guidance and time to apply for approval of their products.
There's been a lot of back-and-forth about the value of electronic cigarettes for helping smokers quit. Some have said they're just gateways to smoking for youth, while others – us included – see them as valuable harm reduction tools for recalcitrant smokers. A new study supports the latter view.
Vivek Murthy recently announced that e-cigarettes pose a "major public health concern," adding that "the use of nicotine-containing products by youth, including e-cigarettes, is unsafe." But that's not what the science says. It'd be far better for the Surgeon General to say that those who don't currently vape shouldn't do it, bit, but that e-cigarettes are likely to prove much safer than regular cigarettes.