A Policy Experiment is Worth a Million Lives

摘要

Smoking cigarettes is a public health disaster in the United States and the rest of the world. Every year, around 500,000 smokers die prematurely, and the Surgeon General considers smoking the single largest preventable cause of death in the United States. But not all tobacco products are alike in the risks they bring to users and those around them. This diversity of ways to deliver nicotine to the user offers regulatory pathways to reducing-perhaps radically-the toll of smoking. Policy experiments at the state level could allow governments to explore and learn from these pathways, but the dominant, hard-line anti-tobacco ideology may stand in the way of implementing the necessary regulations.