Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.” –  Franklin D. Roosevelt E-cigarette use among youth has grown at an alarming rate. In 2017, over 2 million U.S. middle and high school students used an e-cigarette. This figure prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to launch a new youth e-cigarette prevention campaign this week to help stem what it refers to as an epidemic. Contrary to a popular misconception, e-cigarettes – including the dominant market brand, JUUL – do contain nicotine, which is a […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Public policies like higher cigarette taxes and expanded access to evidence-based cessation treatment can help lower smoking rates in Indianapolis and across the state. But employers looking to help their employees quit and improve their health today have a number of tools already available, beyond these longer-term policy efforts. Take the experience of two Fortune 500 companies who used incentives to help employees quit. In 2004, General Electric launched a program that offered employees up to $750 if they quit smoking for 12 months. To test the impact, GE randomly offered the incentive to some […]