Why Is Nicotine Use Being Normalized?
Products like Zyn are bringing nicotine back into mainstream use. What's really going on?
Hi Readers!
I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys.
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In this edition:
‘My Hands Were Really Shaky’: High-School Journalist Documents ICE Raids
The New Age of Nicotine
Science Shows Very Different Psychiatric Disorders Might Have The Same Cause
My Picture Was Used In Child Abuse Images. AI Is Putting Others Through My Nightmare
Stay-At-Home Sons Are Here — And They’re Not Going Anywhere
Breaking The Cycle Of “Toxic Masculinity”
For Teens, Any Cannabis Use May Have Impact on Emotional Health, Academic Performance
‘My Hands Were Really Shaky’: High-School Journalist Documents ICE Raids (The Guardian)
By Rachel Leingang: When immigration enforcement agents came on to her Minneapolis high school’s grounds on 7 January, Lila Dominguez was in the school’s basement working on an article about an ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day. The high school junior was glued to her phone watching videos from outside the school.
Dominguez is one of the city’s tens of thousands of students living in the middle of ICE’s surge into their communities. Soon after agents came on to school grounds at Roosevelt, Minneapolis Public Schools announced it would cancel school for two days and give students the option to attend virtually through mid-February.
Dominguez started Roosevelt high school’s digital newspaper a few months back. Her instinct after ICE came to campus on the same day as the shooting: write about it, tell her classmates what was happening. Agents had used chemical irritants outside the school and detained a staffer. The school had locked the doors to protect those inside during the chaos, but staff and students saw agents in action. READ MORE
From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? I’ve been riveted by the stories of how ordinary citizens in Minneapolis are coming together as neighbors to non-violently defend their communities from ICE and deliver groceries to families in hiding, and was especially struck by this account from a teen journalist of what happened when ICE showed up at her own school.
The New Age of Nicotine (Men’s Health)
By Rachel Epstein: When did nicotine become so...normalized? It’s a question Men’s Health staffers asked ourselves as we watched athletes and actors and a certain health secretary alike pop nicotine pouches like it’s nobody’s business. Small tea bag–like pouches of tobacco-free nicotine powder that you tuck between your gum and lip, they’re discreet and spit-free, and they don’t make you smell like smoke. These pouches have gone so mainstream that last year, the FDA authorized the marketing of 20 Zyn products (arguably the most popular nicotine pouch brand in the U.S.) despite also warning of its addictive properties and stating that no tobacco product is safe.
