The battle of the butts
To Professor Gregory Connolly of the Harvard School of Public Health, estimates that smoking may be banned in the United States by 2050 aren’t good enough. “I want to see the last cigarette sold to a child by 2020,” Connolly said. “I want to accelerate that because I want to go to the party.” Connolly, professor of the practice of public health and director of the School’s Center for Global Tobacco Control, heads a team of affiliated faculty members, students, and fellows conducting research in the United States and overseas on the health effects of tobacco use and on the effectiveness of interventions designed to stop it. Just since the beginning of the year, Connolly and his colleagues authored publications covering secondhand smoke in Israeli bars, menthol cigarettes and Japanese women, and the attitudes of nonsmokers toward smoking in Greece, finding that the nonsmokers would work toward compliance with smoking laws. Together with...