Smoking remains a major public health challenge in Rhode Island. While Rhode Island has one of the lowest reported youth smoking rates in the US at 4.2%, and smoking rates have declined from 17.4% to 14.4% from 2011-2016 for adults and 13% to 4.2% from 2009-2019 for high school students, roughly a quarter of RI’s […]

“Buck Duke will not be forgotten, a debt he owes in part to other forgotten men, ones not so adept at the American art of transformation by dint of desire.” 1 James Buchanan (Buck) Duke founded Duke University after a career spent revolutionizing the American tobacco industry. He famously created and then dominated the cigarette […]

Many habits—both healthy and unhealthy—are established during adolescence. For this reason, strong data regarding youth behaviors can be of immense value to health policymakers, as well as schools and parents. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) seeks to gather precisely this type of data. Yet the survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control […]

A quote from Plato’s work Phaedrus says, “Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.” This proverb is an apt description of some recent research on e-cigarettes and tobacco harm reduction, where first assumptions appear to be inaccurate based on […]

In the early 1800s, enormous crowds would gather to watch the young Humphry Davy (1778–1829) deliver of one his famous chemical lectures at London’s Royal Institution. From his regular inhalation of questionably large volumes of laughing gas to his enormous exploding volcanoes, this young and self-appointed genius did not disappoint. He scandalized the press by […]