Vaping, Controlling Platform Companies, EPA Rule Rollbacks, and Latin American Interference

I. Vaping
Last November, "the FDA announced that almost 21% of high school students had vaped during the previous month, a 78% increase over the year before. That number jumped again this year, to 27.5%, meaning that more than 4 million American teenagers vape regularly, according to preliminary reports from federal health officials. [1]

"Eighth-graders who vape are 10 times as likely to eventually smoke cigarettes as their nonvaping peers, HHS says."

"Juul has assiduously followed Big Tobacco's playbook: aggressively marketing to youth and making implied health claims a central pillar of its business plan."

"A four-pack costs $16, and each 200-puff pod delivers a much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes."

II. Vaping More Popular Than Smoking in High Schools
Percentage of high  schoolers who, in the past month, have smoked: 16% in 2011 versus 6% in 2019.
Percentage who have vaped: 2% in 2011 versus 28% in 2019.
Percentage of vapers among adults: 3% versus 28% among high schoolers. [2]

III. Controlling Platform Companies
"In the intelligence world, countries copy what works, and the FBI has already said China and Iran are getting in on the game. Just this year, Facebook and Twitter have taken down hundreds of accounts and handles affiliated with Iran influence operations." [3]

"That doesn't mean government has no role. Congress should amend the Communications Decency Act of 1996, particularly Section 230. It was that law that declared the platform companies were not publishers and gave them blanket immunity for the content that is on them."

"I've long thought that we don't have a 'fake news' problem, we have a media literacy problem. Millions of people just can't tell the difference between a made-up story and a factual one, and don't know how to do so."

IV. EPA Rule Rollbacks
"A recent New York Times analysis found that [Trump's] White House has killed, stymied. or targeted 84 environmental rules. Among the regulations the administration has set its sights on are those regarding chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide linked to neurological damage in children. [4]

"And then Trump took office. In March 2017, shortly after meeting with the CEO of Dow Chemical, the leading manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt rejected the prohibition in July, despite a court-order, the EPA again refused to implement a ban."

ADDENDUM:
*"From 1900 to 2006, power changed hands in [Latin America] 162 times via military coup, typically announced from a studio of a state broadcaster. In a striking number of cases -- at least 41, by the count of a Harvard study -- the force behind the coup was the U.S., which maintained a proprietary hold over the hemisphere it regarded as its realm. [5]

Footnotes:
[1[ TIME, September 30, 2019.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Excerpts from a forthcoming book, "Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It" by Stengel.

[4] Molly Minta, "EPA Rules Rollbacks," The Nation, September 30, 2019.

[5] Karl Vick, "The U.S. watches Venezuela teeters," TIME, May 13, 2019.