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Page 22 of 36 / 848 articles
A nascent movement is emerging—led by nicotine consumers themselves—demanding a voice in the policies that affect their lives. The movement is fragmented, under-resourced, and dismissed by the public health establishment. It is also morally compelling, and it is not going away.
The FDA's PMTA process has authorized 23 vaping products—all from major tobacco companies. The independent vaping industry that created the category has been effectively eliminated from the legal market. What has been lost in the regulatory clearance is the innovation that made vaping an effective cessation tool.
The global nicotine market is consolidating around three companies—Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, and Japan Tobacco International—that control the cigarette business, the vaping market, and the emerging pouch and heated-tobacco categories. The consolidation raises questions that antitrust law was designed to answer.
One hundred more articles, following two hundred before them. The third series concludes—not because the nicotine story has been fully told, but because every inquiry must have its ending. The landscape has been mapped. The work continues.
A century of cinema, photography, and advertising has encoded the cigarette into the visual language of glamour, rebellion, and interiority. Public health campaigns have changed what we know about smoking. They haven't changed what it looks like.
The public discourse about youth nicotine use focuses almost exclusively on peer influence, industry marketing, and adolescent risk-taking. Almost entirely absent is the most powerful predictor of youth nicotine use: parental smoking. The double standard reveals uncomfortable truths about who is held responsible.
Tobacco farming is not just an occupation. It is an identity—transmitted across generations, embedded in community life, and inseparable from the farmer's sense of self. The transition away from tobacco must address not just the economics but the identity.
Product liability litigation—the same legal strategy that transformed the tobacco industry in the 1990s—is being deployed against vaping companies. The litigation will shape the industry as much as regulation, and the outcomes are unpredictable in ways that regulation is not.
The line between public health protection and paternalistic control is thin—and the nicotine policy debate has crossed it repeatedly, in both directions. The most difficult question in tobacco regulation is not 'what works?' but 'who decides?'
The moment a smoker extinguishes their last cigarette, a cascade of physiological changes begins—some within minutes, some within years. Understanding this cascade, in all its complexity, is the most powerful tool for sustaining the quit attempt through its hardest moments.
In a world where industry-funded research is dismissed as biased, public-health research is dismissed as ideological, and the public can't distinguish between the two, the nicotine debate has entered a post-truth phase. The consequences for public health are only beginning to unfold.
The vaping community was once a cohesive subculture united by a shared identity and a shared fight for survival. Today, it has fragmented into competing segments—enthusiasts, convenience users, and the nicotine-curious—with divergent interests and no common political voice.
Philip Morris International doesn't sell cigarettes anymore—it sells a 'smoke-free future.' The language, the branding, the investor presentations, and the product design have all been re-engineered to position the nicotine industry as a technology sector. The transformation is partly real—and partly rhetorical.
Smoking accelerates aging—skin, cardiovascular, cognitive. But nicotine, independent of smoking, has neuroprotective properties that have made it a subject of research for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. The molecule is not the problem. The delivery system is.
Prison smoking bans, implemented in the name of health, have created a black-market economy where a single cigarette can cost $20 and where enforcement is arbitrary, racialized, and largely ineffectual. The story of smoking behind bars is a story about the limits of prohibition.
Thousands of schools have installed vape detectors—bathroom sensors that detect vapor and alert administrators. The technology is marketed as a health and safety measure. It is also a surveillance infrastructure that normalizes monitoring of adolescent behavior in spaces that were previously private.
Millions of Indian women, working from home, hand-roll bidis—the small, leaf-wrapped cigarettes consumed by hundreds of millions of South Asians. They are among the most exploited workers in the global tobacco supply chain, and their voices are almost entirely absent from the tobacco control discourse.
As cities and counties pass innovative tobacco control measures—flavor bans, tobacco retailer licensing, minimum-price laws—state legislatures are preempting their authority. The preemption battle is a fight about public health federalism that has implications far beyond tobacco.
As smoking rates decline, a counter-trend has emerged: the revival of defunct cigarette brands, retro packaging, and nostalgia-driven marketing that appeals to consumers who remember—or imagine—a time when smoking was glamorous. The nostalgia market reveals the cultural persistence of smoking.
Smoking during pregnancy is one of the most harmful things a pregnant woman can do. But what about nicotine replacement therapy? What about vaping? The evidence is limited, the stakes are enormous, and the default recommendation—'abstain from everything'—is not always achievable.
Harm reduction—providing safer alternatives to people who cannot or will not abstain—has saved millions of lives across HIV, drug policy, and tobacco. And yet, at the moment of its greatest success, it faces a coordinated backlash from the institutions that should be its champions.
The 2019 EVALI outbreak—lung injuries associated with illicit THC cartridges containing vitamin E acetate—killed 68 people and hospitalized thousands. The nicotine vaping industry, which had nothing to do with the outbreak, suffered the regulatory and reputational consequences. The scars remain.
Tobacco companies are excluded from ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) investment funds by definition. But their pivot to reduced-risk products, combined with their extraordinary profitability, has created a paradox: the most socially harmful industry is also one of the most financially durable.
The claim that 'nicotine harms the developing adolescent brain' is the central justification for youth vaping restrictions. The evidence for this claim is real—but its scope is narrower, and its policy implications more nuanced, than the public discourse acknowledges.
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