The Foundation recently consulted with external experts from the fields of HIV and drug harm reduction to learn how they were able to tilt the needle away from moral panic, toward evidence-informed policies. Drawing on decades of experience, they told us that success requires a concerted effort to harness not just data, but emotion and […]

In the 1950s, if you asked a smoker why he or she smoked, they would not have replied, “because I am hopelessly addicted.” More likely, they would have told you about the pleasure they experienced from smoking. Today, we know something they did not. Smoking kills. Worldwide, 1.1 billion people smoke, causing more than 7 million deaths each year. […]

Years ago, at a global health research meeting, I remember one of the speakers complaining that researchers from high-income countries often “behave like a flock of seagulls” when working in low- and middle-income countries. She explained, “We have an ethical obligation not to fly in, collect the data, and then fly back out again, leaving […]

Small study; interesting findings. A new article published in Drug and Alcohol Review details how vaping (using e-cigarettes) helps some people avoid relapsing back to smoking. The authors, Caitlin Notley, Emma Ward, Lynne Dawkins, Richard Holland, and Sarah Jakes, have made a clear-headed and nuanced contribution to this controversial field. The paper is especially interesting to me because […]

The eighth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP8) to the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) opened on Monday, October 1, 2018, in Geneva, Switzerland. This weeklong series of discussions will focus on global progress that has been made in the fight against tobacco. The FCTC, a treaty that has […]