Stephan: I don’t actually know anyone who still smokes tobacco, do you? But, as this report describes, tobacco smokers have actually increased. It is a measure of how self-destructive humans are that people, particularly young people choose to ignore all the evidence and willfully surrender their wellbeing to addiction and slow form suicide.
The study said efforts to curb smoking had been outstripped by population growth. Credit: Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty
Smoking killed almost 8 million people in 2019 and the number of smokers rose as the habit was picked up by young people around the world, according to new research.
A study published in the Lancet on Thursday said efforts to curb the habit had been outstripped by population growth with 150 million more people smoking in the nine years from 1990, reaching an all-time high of 1.1 billion.
The study’s authors said governments need to focus on reducing the uptake of smoking among young people, as 89% of new smokers were addicted by the age of 25 but beyond that age were unlikely to start.
“Young people are particularly vulnerable to addiction, and with high rates of cessation remaining elusive worldwide, the tobacco epidemic will continue for years to come unless countries can dramatically reduce the number of new smokers starting each year,” said the study’s lead author Marissa Reitsma, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Though the prevalence of smoking has reduced globally over […]
Stephan: It is becoming clearer and clearer that the illness profit model cannot continue. We are being damaged, the country's wellbeing is being compromised, by the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. This is another one of those issues that is being blocked by the whoring of the Republican Party, and its subservience to its corporate masters. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Katie Porter have the right program. The question is do Americans really understand why this issue is so important? I am no longer sure.
American biopharmaceutical company Abbvie logo seen displayed on a smartphone with USD (United States dollar) currency in the background. (Illustration by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
Pharmaceutical giant AbbVie inflated prices for widely-used drugs while its executives pocketed growing bonuses, according to a new report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Now it’s helping fund ads attacking legislation that would lower prescription drug costs.
The committee’s two-year investigation found that AbbVie “pursued a variety of tactics to increase drug sales while raising prices for Americans, including exploiting the patent system to extend its market monopoly, abusing orphan drug protections to further block competition, and engaging in anticompetitive pricing practices.”
The company raised the cost of the popular drug Humira, which is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other ailments, 27 times and by a total of more than 470%, according to the report. An annual supply of the drug now costs $77,000. AbbVie, along with Jannsen Biotech, also hiked the price of Imburvica, a drug used to treat certain cancers, by 82%, raising the cost of an annual supply to between $181,529 to $242,039, according to […]
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for over a decade that this was coming, and now it is beginning. The migration out of the Southwest as a result of climate change is one of the three big internal migrations that are going to occur in the United States, and if you live in the Southwest I would think about my options.
Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
One of the fastest-warming regions of the U.S. is the Southwest — and that region, plus the broader West, is stuck in its most expansive and intense drought of the 21st century.
Why it matters: Studies show that a warming climate is exacerbating the drought, and in some ways may be triggering it in the first place. That means the Southwest is drying out — and California’s large wildfires could start as soon as next month.
And one climate researcher says California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains saw one of the fastest snow melt-outs in history this year.
The drought situation is particularly severe in the Colorado River Basin and northern California. Scientists and public officials are warning that the California wildfire season is likely to be severe, due to the combination of dry vegetation and above-average temperatures.
This one comes on the heels of the worst fire season in state history, which turned the skies above San Francisco a “Blade Runner” orange last year.
The big picture: Some parts of the world are already getting close to, or have […]
Stephan: I do so agree with this excellent essay about something that has increasingly concerned me. Think about what is going on in the United States, and be aware of what is being said about these things publically by major political officials in the Republican Party. How can this possibly be normal? How can American citizens listening to this, who have lived through the 6 January insurrection, the 230 some mass murders from our national gun psychosis, and all the rest of the White nationalist toxic violence sit still for this? I find this very alarming.
Lawmakers such as Reps. Andrew Clyde and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t seem to have been hurt too much by their gaslighting over the events of Jan. 6, Curtis writes. CreditTom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Is America getting a thirst for blood?
It’s a question I ask after hearing too many Republicans dismiss the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a violent pro-Trump mob trying to halt the counting of American citizens’ votes as a “normal tourist visit,” in the words of Georgia Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, the same Clyde seen — mouth open and terrified — helping to barricade the besieged doors that day.
When I was a Baltimore schoolgirl, we often visited Washington, D.C., to tour the monuments. It was an easy and informative field trip, barely an hour away by bus. Now kids can occasionally be unruly, and the nuns had to raise their voices once or twice. But I don’t recall ever erecting gallows on the Capitol lawn, breaking windows or pummeling police officers with batons and their own shields. In fact, I’m sure it would […]
Stephan: I think the success of Qanon's hysterical nonsense can be traced back to the fact that America has not had the kind of civil disruption that has affected both Western and Eastern Europe. Americans don't really have any idea what it would be like to live under an authoritarian fascist government. They just can't imagine it, and for about a third of the country their racism, resentment, and grievances blind them from being able to even conceive of such a change. And this is augmented by the fact that one of the country's political parties is made up of grifters and corporate whores.
To figure out who might be a follower of the unhinged conspiracy movement QAnon, researchers might look at a person’s religious beliefs, or their devotion to Donald Trump, or even their belief in other conspiracy theories.
And while all of these can be indicators of a predilection to believing in QAnon, the single best predictor is which TV news station you watch, with those who favor right-wing sources up to nine times more likely to believe in the conspiracy than those who trust mainstream broadcast network news.
That’s the finding of a new survey from the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which surveyed over 5,500 adults in all 50 states over a two week period in early March.
Nationally, the survey found that a whopping 15% of Americans—roughly 31 million people—believed in the completely unfounded claim that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
The figure jumped to 20%—or 42 million Americans—for the less outlandish, but still baseless, claim that […]
