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There’s a New Video Game Where You Can Run Your Own Private Prison. It’s Strangely Addictive.

by DaniloIredale Posted on October 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s late at night and I am staring at my computer screen, contemplating a decision: Do I go to bed or reorganize my prison so that medium- and maximum-security inmates go to chow and the yard at separate times? It would probably help bring the violence down. Or I could design a separate walkway from the maximum-security cellblock to the yard and put a fence down the middle to separate the dangerous from the more vulnerable inmates. This could easily take hours. This is why I swore off video games 15 years ago.

Around the same time that I quit gaming, developers Chris Delay, Mark Morris, and a couple of college friends began developing niche games in an industry dominated by blockbuster-driven companies with megabudgets. Their small, London-based company, Introversion, eschewed flashy graphics in favor of nuanced story lines and strategy. They designed a game about hackers and a sci-fi strategy game, Darwinia, which won the Independent Game Festival Award.

By 2010, the team was in a slump, and Delay took off on a vacation to San Francisco. During a tour of Alcatraz with his wife, the idea hit him: Why not design a game around a prison? Not an action-packed first-person shooter, but one where you play the CEO of a private prison company, tasked with designing, building, and managing your own lockup? Delay didn’t know much about prisons, but the more he researched—interviewing guards and former inmates—the more he realized they were ripe for the most complex of Sim City-style games.

Introversion, now with a staff of nine, spent the next five years designing Prison Architect. They released a beta version in 2012 and attracted more than 1 million players. It was their biggest hit, and they released the full version this month.

Like most simulations, the game has no real end point. The purpose is to delve ever deeper into a system you create, to wrestle with your own beliefs and morality in a fictional world whose mechanics bear a striking resemblance to real-life prisons.

Delay and Morris say they strictly avoided leading players to a particular moral conclusion. “We are not prison reformists,” Morris told me. “There is no agenda here.” This, ultimately, is what makes the game succeed. There is no secret trick to making your prison function well, and since you can’t really win, the very idea of what constitutes a successful prison is yours to interpret.

Introversion Software

Prison Architect is not an easy game. Newcomers go through a “campaign mode” tutorial where they are thrown into a succession of five prisons and tasked with fixing various problems. The learning curve is steep—I probably spent 20 hours working through it—but subplots about mob assassinations, an execution, and a prison CEO burning documents during a riot create tensions to string you along.

The real game, however, is a blank slate. You are given a piece of land, $30,000, eight construction workers, and 24 hours (24 minutes in game time) before your first eight prisoners arrive. You can adjust how many you take in each day, but as with real private prisons, inmates equal revenue. And even if profit isn’t your motive, you need money to operate.

Inevitably, you begin with certain necessities. You need to contain your prisoners, so you lay a foundation for temporary holding cells. You need to hire a warden, and the applicants range from even-tempered to inflexible, politically connected, or corrupt. The warden needs an office with a desk and filing cabinet to work in. The prisoners need to eat, of course, so you put up a kitchen and hire a couple of cooks. You quickly learn from your mistakes—prisoners walk off if they are not fenced in; toilets don’t function without a water pump and plumbing.

It’s once you master the basics that things get interesting—do you want to build a Scandanavian-style model of reform or a totalitarian hellhole? Do you want to take a stab at remedying the challenges of the US prison system, figuring out how to manage maximum-security prisoners without solitary confinement?

I decide to invest heavily in rehabilitative aspects. I make the cells spacious and well furnished. I put pool tables in common areas. I prioritize visitation and a library. I build a classroom and start up basic education, drug addiction treatment, and job training. The deeper I get, the more I find myself thinking like a prison bureaucrat. I stop paying attention to the particulars of each inmate’s rap sheet and hire a psychologist who gives me reports on the population as a whole, measuring everything from overall hygiene to spiritual fulfillment. Morale, I am happy to note, is high.

But then things start to slip. More prisoners are coming in than I have cells for. I need a new cellblock, which involves running electricity to the building, constructing cells, bringing in beds, building a day room, and more. As my workers build, I notice that prisoners aren’t getting enough food. Are there enough tables in the canteen? Do they need more time to eat? More cooks? Someone gets bloodied in the shower room. Should I assign a guard to watch over it from now on? Should I shake down the whole prison to get rid of any weapons? In focusing on prisoner well-being, I’ve neglected my staff, which is now getting exhausted. Should I build a break room and hire more guards so they aren’t so overworked, or invest in surveillance cameras and lay some off?

Before I know it, my growing list of issues has put the inmates on edge. One shanks a fellow prisoner in an overcrowded holding cell. Another has a hammer—did I not have enough guards in the workshop? A riot breaks out. The holding cell catches fire and the inmates run amok, killing guards and each other. Someone offs the chief of security—I didn’t give him a locking door!—which means I can’t give guards orders until I hire a new one. I call in riot police and the fire department. When things start to calm, I build a mortuary for all the bodies and decide I need to hire a dog patrol and maybe turn my new chapel into an armory.

Introversion Software

This is just the drift of my particular game. I learn that security lapses will lead to problems no matter how well you treat inmates, but tough-on-crime players will quickly find that denying privileges or raising the stakes for parole makes for a rowdy prison. They can beef up security, sure, but at some point they will realize money can only buy so many solitary cells. Inmates in the hole can’t do grunt work around the prison, so they will need to hire more janitors and cooks. They will also need extra guards to bring food to inmates who aren’t allowed to go to chow. Sooner or later, they might need to reconsider their approach: Should they just let it slide when inmates get caught boozing or hiding cigarettes?

Prison Architect is amazingly intricate, but the gamification creates certain falsehoods. Real private prisons, for example, aren’t rewarded when inmates get released. In real life, the only practical incentive for giving prisoners meaningful things to do is that it tends to keep them calm. Companies don’t get more money for turning out prisoners who don’t go back to crime.

There are also some major omissions. Race is functionally meaningless in Prison Architect. Morris says they were wary of “playing lip service to the issue,” though he is considering how race might be integrated into a future version. Inmates could be assigned traits like race, sexuality, and religion, and a small bias could be built into the game, he says, that makes prisoners congregate in communities that match their identities: “Once you’ve got that congregation occurring, it might be possible to model hatred.” A particularly hateful inmate might be prone to attacking members of another group, which could spark events like the race wars that have broken out in real US prisons. This would offer the player a new set of conundrums: Do you segregate by race? Lock the more hateful inmates in solitary? Try to create programs to help lower prisoner aggression while making sure inmates don’t run into someone they might stab in class?

The game makers say Prison Architect wasn’t based on any particular prison system, but I find it hard to come up with a prison that veers very far from a US-style lockup. Even when I get better at controlling the population, my reform-minded prison quickly goes bankrupt. Large cells and sweeping rehabilitative programs are expensive, so when my government grants run out, I have to shut down classes and drug treatment. I lay off guards and start serving worse—cheaper—food. I ponder whether I should build a shop and train inmates to make license plates to bring in some revenue.

Herein lies the message: Prisons are just one piece of a larger system. How they are operated makes a difference, yes, but they exist within the constraints of budgets, legislation, policing, and the conditions that drive people to crime. As long as those remain the same, competing philosophies about prison management won’t amount to much more than tinkering, figuring out how to squeeze a dollar late into the night.

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There’s a New Video Game Where You Can Run Your Own Private Prison. It’s Strangely Addictive.

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Ben Carson Links Gun Control to Hitler’s Rise

by LeaMichalski Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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As he defends a string of controversial comments he made in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Oregon, Ben Carson just keeps one-upping himself. Appearing on CNN on Thursday afternoon, Carson was questioned by Wolf Blitzer on a claim in his recent book, A More Perfect Union, in which he connects the rise of Hitler to gun control. “There were a number of countries where tyranny reigned, and before it happened, they disarmed the people,” Carson said. “That was my point.”

When Blitzer pressed further and asked whether an absence of gun control laws in Europe would have saved six million Jews from being slaughtered, Carson responded: “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”

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Ben Carson Links Gun Control to Hitler’s Rise

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Gun Control’s Biggest Problem: Most People Just Don’t Care Very Much

by Neil4262623928 Posted on October 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Atkins writes about the problem of getting gun control legislation passed:

There is a broadening schism in the activist community between those who focus on nuts-and-bolts electoral and legislative politics, and those who spend their energy on issue-area visibility and engagement….Election work and party involvement is increasingly seen as the unhip, uncool, morally compromised province of social climbers and “brogressives” not truly committed to the supposedly “real work” of social justice engagement by non-electoral means.

….There is certainly great value in persuasion, engagement and visibility model….But gun politics in the United States shows above all the weaknesses and limits of the engagement model. The vast majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws….Numerous organizations have engaged in countless petitions and demonstrations to shame legislators into action from a variety of perspectives, but it essentially never works.

….The reason that the United States cannot seem to do anything about guns is simply that the NRA and the vocal minority of the nation’s gun owners mobilize to vote on the issue, while the large majority that favors gun safety laws does not….Gun control will pass precisely when legislators become more afraid of the votes of gun control supporters than they are of gun control opponents. That will only happen when interested organizations invest in field work—that much maligned, unsexy work of precinct walking and phonebanking—to mobilize voters on that issue, and when liberal organizations work to unseat Democrats who do the bidding of the NRA and replace them with ones who vote to protect the people.

I’m not sure Atkins has this right. The problem is in the second bolded sentence: “The vast majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws.” There’s some truth to this, but there’s also a big pitfall here, and it’s one that liberals are especially vulnerable to. I routinely read lefties who quote polls to show that the country agrees with us on pretty much everything. Voters support teachers, they support the environment, they support financial reform, they support gun control.

But this is a bad misreading of what polls can tell us. There are (at least) two related problems here:

Most polls don’t tell us how deeply people feel. Sure, lots of American think that universal background checks are a good idea, but they don’t really care that much. In a recent Gallup poll of most important problems, gun control ranked 22nd, with only 2 percent rating it their most important issue. Needless to say, though, gun owners are opposed to background checks, and they care a lot.
Most polls don’t tell us about the tradeoffs people are willing to make. In the abstract, sure, maybe a majority of Americans think we should make it harder to buy guns. But if there’s a real-world price to pay how willing are they to pay it? A few months ago, a Pew poll that pitted gun control against gun rights found that gun rights won by 52-46 percent.

There are lots of polls, and some of them probably show a greater intensity among those who support gun control. A lot depends on question wording. But that’s sort of my point: If you get substantially different responses because of small changes in question wording or depending on which precise issues you ask about (background checks vs. assault weapons, gun locks vs. large-capacity magazines) that’s a sign of low intensity.

Atkins is certainly right that Democratic legislators won’t act on gun control until voters are mobilized, but that puts the cart before the horse. You can’t mobilize voters on an issue they don’t really care much about in the first place. In this case, I think the folks who prioritize issue-area visibility and engagement probably have the better of the argument. Until voters who favor gun control feel as strongly as those who oppose it, all the field work in the world won’t do any good.

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Gun Control’s Biggest Problem: Most People Just Don’t Care Very Much

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Jeb Bush on Oregon Mass Murder: "Stuff Happens"

by ShereeMacMahon Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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While speaking to reporters during a campaign stop in Greenville, South Carolina, on Friday, Jeb Bush weighed in on the latest school shooting to take place in the United States, this time in Oregon, just a day before.

“We’re in a difficult time in our country and I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this,” Bush said. “I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s very sad to see. But I resist the notion, and I had this challenge as governor—look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis. The impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”

You can watch the full video here:

When asked by a reporter if he stood by the “stuff happens” part of his quote, Bush did not back down:

The astonishingly callous summation of Thursday’s deadly rampage that killed 10 people and injured seven others was buffered by Bush’s criticism against renewed calls for gun control.

Originally posted here – 

Jeb Bush on Oregon Mass Murder: "Stuff Happens"

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

by CarmeloPerkinson Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lots of people have asked lots of questions about Hillary Clinton and her email server. That’s fair enough. But I’ve got a couple of questions for the people with all the questions. There might be simple answers to these, but they’ve been bugging me for a while and I still don’t really understand them. Here they are:

One of the most persistent suspicions is that Hillary set up a private server in order to evade FOIA requests. But this has never made any sense to me. What could possibly have led either Hillary or her staff to believe this? There’s simply nothing in either the statute or in the way it’s been applied in practice to suggest that official communications are beyond the reach of FOIA just because they’re in private hands.

On a related note, what was going on in the State Department’s FOIA office? They received several FOIA requests that required them to search Hillary’s email, and responded by saying there was no record of anything relevant to the request. But the very first time they did this, they must have realized that Hillary’s email archive wasn’t just sparse, but nonexistent. Did they ask Hillary’s office about this? If not, why not? If they did, what were they told? This should be relatively easy to answer since I assume these folks can be subpoenaed and asked about it.

Generally speaking, the reason I’ve been skeptical about this whole affair is that the nefarious interpretations have never made much sense to me. What Hillary did was almost certainly dumb—as she’s admitted herself—and it’s possible that she even violated some regulations. But those are relatively minor things. Emailgate is only a big issue if there was some kind of serious intent to defraud, and that hardly seems possible:

Hillary’s private server didn’t protect her from FOIA requests and she surely knew this.
By all indications, she was very careful about her email use and never wrote anything she might regret if it became public.
And it hardly seems likely that she thought she could delete embarrassing emails before turning them over. There’s simply too much risk that the missing emails would show up in someone else’s account, and that really would be disastrous. Her husband might be the type to take idiotic risks like that, but she isn’t.

School me, peeps. I fully acknowledge that maybe I’m just not getting something here. What’s the worst case scenario that’s actually plausible?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m asking here solely about FOIA as it applies to the Hillary Clinton email server affair. On a broader level, FOIA plainly has plenty of problems, both in terms of response time and willingness to cooperate with the spirit of the statute.

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

by Jesus44Ccz Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A leading group of climate change skeptics is concerned that paganism is creeping into the Catholic Church. That was the message delivered by Gene Koprowski, director of marketing at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, at a press conference in Philadelphia Thursday.

The event, which Heartland had billed as a challenge to Pope Francis’ “views on global warming and the nature of capitalism,” was recorded by the liberal group American Bridge. Talking Points Memo first reported on the video Friday. You can watch an excerpt above.

The pope, who is visiting the United States next week, has called on policymakers to take action to control climate change and has criticized the excesses of free market capitalism. According to Koprowski, when Heartland staffers first began reading news stories about the pope speaking out on climate, they were “shocked that the pope was buying into this left-wing political craze that is global warming.” So in April, Heartland sent a delegation of climate skeptics to Rome to offer a “prebuttal” to a Vatican climate summit in an attempt to change the pope’s mind.

“When the Vatican leapt into the controversy on climate science, we were initially under the impression that His Holiness was a victim of bad advice from bad advisers,” Koprowski said Thursday. “There were people from the UN who were population control advocates. There were people from other left-wing groups who were advising the pontiff.”

But Koprowski said that after the pope released his landmark encyclical calling for action on climate change, he began to suspect that “something more may be afoot.” Koprowski then invoked pagan rituals and “nature worship” that he said were “seeping into the Church” during the Middle Ages, adding: “I’m wondering, as a scholar, if pagan forms are returning to the Church this day.”

Koprowski concluded: “I would say, contrary to some of the criticism, that this is not communism that has entered the church. It’s, rather, paganism.”

Heartland and Koprowski did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

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How Much Is 1.6 Months of Life Worth?

by kfjghgjkjkfdsgfdsdfdsflok Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Carolyn Johnson at Wonkblog:

With some cancer drug prices soaring past $10,000 a month….

Hey, that’s me! A friendly FedEx delivery person just delivered this month’s $10,000 supply to me an hour ago. So, what’s up?

With some cancer drug prices soaring past $10,000 a month, doctors have begun to ask one nagging question: Do drug prices correctly reflect the value they bring to patients by extending or improving their lives?

A study published Thursday in JAMA Oncology aims to answer that question by examining necitumumab, an experimental lung cancer drug….in a clinical trial, researchers found that adding the drug to chemotherapy extended life by 1.6 months, on average.

….In order to estimate what the price of this drug “should” be based on its value to patients, the research team modeled various scenarios….one additional year in perfect health in the U.S. is worth somewhere between $50,000 and $200,000….Based on their calculations, the drug should cost from $563 to $1,309 for a three-week cycle.

….There are many variables that go into the price of a drug, but mounting evidence suggests that the value it brings to patients is not the biggest factor. “How they price the drug is they price it at whatever the market is willing to bear,” said Benjamn Djulbegovic, an oncologist at the University of South Florida.

Well, sure, but this raises the question of why the market is willing to bear such high prices. Why would an insurance company approve a large expenditure for a drug that has only a tiny benefit?

There’s a lot that goes into this. Obviously some people benefit from necitumumab by a lot more than 1.6 months—and there’s no way to tell beforehand who will and who won’t. And it costs a lot to develop these drugs. And patients put a lot of pressure on insurers to cover anything that might help. And, in the end, insurance companies don’t have a ton of incentive to push back: if drug prices go up, they increase their premiums. It doesn’t really affect their bottom line much.

There’s also the size of the total market to consider. The chemo drug I’m currently taking, for example, is only used for two conditions. There’s just not a whole lot of us using it. In cases like that, a drug is going to be pretty expensive.

But here’s something I’m curious about: who puts more pressure on insurance companies to cover expensive drugs, patients or doctors? My doctor, for example, was totally gung-ho about my current med. I was much less so after I read some of the clinical studies online. Why? Because most chemo drugs have unpleasant side effects (though mine has turned out OK so far), which means that, like many patients, I’m reluctant to take them unless the benefit is pretty clear cut. Doctors, on the other hand, just want to do whatever they can to help, and have no particular incentive to hold back. So maybe it’s doctors who need to be in the forefront of pushing back on expensive drugs. They’re the ones in the doctor-patient relationship who know the most, after all.

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How Much Is 1.6 Months of Life Worth?

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Hillary’s Email: Still No There There

by LelaSandoval Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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The AP’s Ken Dilanian reports on the use of email in the State Department:

The transmission of now-classified information across Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email is consistent with a State Department culture in which diplomats routinely sent secret material on unsecured email during the past two administrations, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

….In five emails that date to Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration, large chunks are censored on the grounds that they contain classified national security or foreign government information….In a December 2006 email, diplomat John J. Hillmeyer appears to have pasted the text of a confidential cable from Beijing about China’s dealings with Iran and other sensitive matters.

….Such slippage of classified information into regular email is “very common, actually,” said Leslie McAdoo, a lawyer who frequently represents government officials and contractors in disputes over security clearances and classified information.

What makes Clinton’s case different is that she exclusively sent and received emails through a home server in lieu of the State Department’s unclassified email system. Neither would have been secure from hackers or foreign intelligence agencies, so it would be equally problematic whether classified information was carried over the government system or a private server, experts say. In fact, the State Department’s unclassified email system has been penetrated by hackers believed linked to Russian intelligence.

….Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said State Department officials were permitted at the time to use personal email accounts for official business, and that the department was aware of Clinton’s private server….There is no indication that any information in Clinton emails was marked classified at the time it was sent.

Whatevs. Let’s spend millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of congressional committee time investigating this anyway. Maybe we’ll finally find that Whitewater confession we’ve been looking for so long.

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Hillary’s Email: Still No There There

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There Is Poop in Basically All Hamburger Meat

by WilmaAldrich Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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There’s a “simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill,” wrote Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. “There is shit in the meat.”

A new Consumer Reports investigation suggests that things haven’t changed much since the publication of Schlosser’s 2001 blockbuster. The team tested 300 packages of ground beef, bought from more than 100 grocery, big-box, and natural food stores in 26 cities nationwide. The result:

All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that signified fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or non-toxin-producing E. coli), which can cause blood or urinary tract infections.

But not all burger meat is created equal. The researchers also compared the bacterial load of beef from conventionally raised (181 samples) cows to that of their no-antibiotic, grass fed, and organic peers (116 samples total), grouped under the heading “more sustainably produced.” Here’s what they found:

From “How Safe is Your Beef?,” Consumer Reports

The bacterial implications of beef production practices really emerged when the researchers tested the bacterial strains for resistance to antibiotics. Nearly a fifth of conventional ground beef carried bacteria three or more classes of antibiotics—more than double the number found in the “more sustainably produced” samples, and triple that found in samples from cows raised outdoors on grass.

From “How Safe is Your Beef?,” Consumer Reports

The article offers plenty of information that could explain these differences. As for why essentially all ground beef carries fecal bacteria, the slaughter and processing of huge animals is messy—feces caked on the hide or trapped in intestines can easily move onto the carcass. That’s not such a big deal in steaks and roasts, because the bacteria tend to stay on the surface, so “when you cook them, the outside is likely to get hot enough to kill any bugs.” But with ground beef, “the bacteria get mixed throughout, contaminating all of the meat—including what’s in the middle of your hamburger.”

Then there’s this problem: “The meat and fat trimmings often come from multiple animals, so meat from a single contaminated cow can end up in many packages of ground beef.”

As for why conventional production—source of 97 percent of US burger meat, according to CR—is moderately more likely to contain certain bacteria like E. coli, and much more likely to contain multi-drug-resistant strains, the report delivers a detailed look at the different production systems.

Conventionally raised cows start out on grass but spend the final months of their lives on feedlots, where they fatten on diets of corn and soybeans, even though “cows’ digestive systems aren’t designed to easily process high-starch foods such as corn and soy,” creating an acidic environment in the cows’ digestive tract that can “lead to ulcers and infections” and “shed more E. coli in their manure.

And corn and soy aren’t the only delicacies feedlot cows feast on.

Their feed can also include include candy (such as gummy bears, lemon drops, and chocolate) to boost their sugar intake and plastic pellets to substitute for the fiber they would otherwise get from grass. Cattle feed can also contain parts of slaughtered hogs and chickens that are not used in food production, and dried manure and litter from chicken barns.

In addition, they can also receive regular low doses of antibiotics, both to prevent infections and promote faster growth, although the Food and Drug Administration has launched a voluntary program to limit the latter use. One common feedlot antibiotic, tylosin—used to ward off liver abscesses—is in “a class of antibiotics that the World Health Organization categorizes as ‘critically important’ for human medicine,” CR reports.

The magazine recommends that consumers buy from the alternative supply chains “whenever possible”—”sustainable methods run the gamut from the very basic ‘raised without antibiotics’ to the most sustainable, which is grass-fed organic.” (The article contains ample detail on each.) And when you get it home, handle it carefully and cook it to 160 degrees. After all, there’s shit in pretty much all the ground beef.

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There Is Poop in Basically All Hamburger Meat

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E-Cigarettes May or May Not Be a Gateway Drug. (But Probably Not.)

by Juliann48Z Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are e-cigarettes a gateway drug to traditional cigarettes? There’s a new study out that suggests they might be:

The study focused on ninth-graders at 10 public schools in Los Angeles who had tried e-cigarettes before the fall of 2013. Researchers surveyed those students in the spring of 2014 and fall of 2014, and discovered that they were about 2½ times as likely as their peers to have smoked traditional cigarettes.

This is a classic case of correlation which may or may not also be causation (something the authors acknowledge). Did more of the e-cigarette kids take up smoking because e-cigarattes gave them a taste for it? Or do the kids who are most likely to take up smoking in the first place simply start with e-cigarettes? There’s no way to tell just from this study.

That’s not to say it’s worthless, though. If the study found no correlation, then you could be pretty sure that e-cigarettes don’t lead to cigarette smoking. That would be worth knowing. But since it did find a correlation, we need more research to know if there’s causation here.

One way to get a tentative read on this is to look at total cigarette smoking among teens. If it’s up, then e-cigarettes might be leading more kids to cigarettes. If it’s not up, then e-cigarettes are probably just temporarily replacing cigarettes for kids who were going to take up smoking anyway. So which is it?

As it happens, we know the answer to this: cigarette smoking has plunged among teenagers over the past four years. On the other hand, total cigarette use among teens (cigarettes + e-cigarettes) has gone up. The cigarette plunge makes it unlikely that e-cigarettes are a gateway to traditional cigarettes. But the increase in total cigarette use suggests that e-cigarettes really are creating a new market. It’s complicated.

Link: 

E-Cigarettes May or May Not Be a Gateway Drug. (But Probably Not.)

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