Human Features Archives - Genetic Literacy Project

America’s health care apparatus is caught in a downward spiral of bureaucratic bloat, runaway expenses and eroding patient care. On this episode of the Facts and Fallacies podcast, emergency medicine physician Dr. Liza Lockwood and host Cameron English pick up their dissection of the systemic failures destroying modern medicine, tracing the crisis to decades of heavy-handed government intervention and corporate consolidation.

What began in the 1990s with HMOs and pre-authorizations metastasized into an administrative nightmare. Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) devolved into cumbersome billing engines, while federal mandates like the High Tech Act and the Affordable Care Act priced independent practices out of existence. Saddled with massive student debt and restrictive non-compete clauses, young physicians are funneled into hospital systems as underpaid employees, permanently severing the doctor-patient relationship.

Meanwhile, predatory litigation—such as long-tail liability for obstetricians—and rampant fraud within government programs like Medicaid siphon billions from taxpayers. Perverse economic incentives dominate the landscape, leaving insured patients facing steep deductibles and medical bills that remain a primary cause of personal bankruptcy. This systemic breakdown has also driven disillusioned patients toward unverified alternative treatments.

Dr. Lockwood argues that true reform will not emerge from inside the machine or through top-down regulations, which only expand administrative waste. Instead, the path forward requires bypassing corporate and federal middlemen. By embracing Direct Primary Care, transparent surgical centers, health savings accounts and alternative financing networks, medicine can restore genuine competition, slash overhead costs, and empower physicians to focus on healing rather than paperwork.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they continue to examine America’s broken health care system.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

An ambitious cohort of cities across the US and Canada has moved ever closer to legalizing drug use—with tragic results. Towns once recognized as safe places to raise a family are now characterized by homeless encampments and “open-air” drug markets. Overdoses and crime rates, both supposed to decline in the wake of liberalized drug laws, have increased in many jurisdictions. Residents in a lot of these communities have been left to deal with the fallout alone as their leaders remain committed to so-called harm-reduction policies intended to make illicit drug use safer. “Harm reduction isn’t just a problem for addicts,” Atlantic staff writer Michael Powell noted recently. “In many cities, the autonomy of drug users has taken precedence over nearly everything and everyone else, not least working-class families …who must live alongside addicts and accept dystopian decay.”

Seattle and similar cities illustrate the pattern. Public fentanyl use, addicts collapsed on sidewalks and schoolchildren observing drug deals have become routine where policies prioritize “meeting users where they are.” Distributing clean needles can reduce HIV and hepatitis transmission among participants, yet this narrow benefit has been overshadowed by increasing disorder and the normalization of addiction in residential neighborhoods.

Portugal’s more structured harm-reduction approach is often cited as a model for the US to follow, yet their strategy retained police involvement and treatment pressure. Perhaps more importantly, drug distribution is still a crime. The policies put in place by state and local officials in the US lack these defining features, usually intentionally. Oregon’s Measure 110 decriminalized possession of small quantities of drugs and produced sharp rises in overdoses and public use before a rapid public backlash and partial reversal. The arrival of fentanyl intensified the death toll, but the policy’s removal of consequences and enforcement made open-air markets and visible addiction far worse.

The reality is that widespread drug use is not inevitable. Heroin-addicted Vietnam veterans largely quit upon returning home, after being removed from a drug-saturated environment, and smoking rates fell dramatically in the US after sustained stigma and restrictions. These examples are strong evidence that norms, consequences and limited supply—all variables harm reduction excludes as “judgemental”—shape demand.

“Safe supply” experiments, in which addicts are given a taxpayer-funded ration of opioids, and the elevation of active users’ autonomy above the interests of children and working families have delivered measurable social decay rather than the promised reductions in harm. Two decades of expanding harm-reduction show the same result: the welfare of families and functioning neighborhoods has been subordinated to enabling public addiction.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they critique the case for drug legalization.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Is Europe’s ideological aversion to air conditioning quietly killing thousands of people? A surprising body of evidence suggests that the continent’s green activism and energy degrowth mindset have turned a solvable public health challenge into a deadly political failure. As climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr. explains in his recent analysis, Europe has warmed about 0.5°C per decade since the 1980s, driving clear increases in extreme heat stress days and summer heat mortality, with 68,000 deaths in 2022 marking a recent high point.

Yet Europe largely chooses these outcomes. Household air conditioning penetration sits at just 19% across much of the EU, compared to roughly 76% in North America and over 90% in Japan. Rigorous U.S. data show AC deployment cuts the risk of dying on extremely hot days by roughly 75%, despite more frequent heat waves. Indeed, northern European countries with relatively temperate climates and low AC rates (e.g., Germany 3%, UK 5%) contribute surprisingly large shares of avoidable deaths alongside hotter Mediterranean nations.

Pielke estimates that matching North American AC use could avert roughly 26,000 heat deaths in a particularly hot summer like 2022. Near-universal coverage could save some 35,000 lives annually. And the gains would concentrate among the elderly—over-65s comprise roughly 93% of deaths—making targeted cooling in homes, care facilities and hospitals effective and affordable.

This could be done without compromising the EU’s climate goals, since countries like France already have largely decarbonized electrical grids; more energy use does not necessitate higher CO2 emissions.

The core problem lies in ideological policies that treat energy consumption itself as a vice: EU building directives, national thermostat rules, permitting barriers, and a broader cultural hostility to “active” cooling all elevate heat-death risk. These policies are reversible with sufficient political will.

As with most sustainability debates, balancing environmental protection with adaptation is not only possible in this case but necessary since lives are on the line. Europe’s experience stands as a cautionary tale against letting degrowth dogma override public health. Evidence-based pragmatism protects the vulnerable. Symbolic technophobia costs lives.

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Museums are now reburying both 12,000-year-old human skeletons and presenting creation myths as factual history—while critical research on the first people in the American Southwest has largely ground to a halt courtesy of progressive politics. So argues anthropologist Dr. Elizabeth Weiss in a recent report examining an alarming ideological shift in her field, The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology.

What began as a narrow effort under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to return clearly affiliated sacred items to American Indian tribes has expanded dramatically. Because of regulatory updates to the law in 2023, remains that predate any modern tribe by thousands of years are being pulled from museum collections. Everyday commercial objects from the 20th century are now treated as cultural patrimony requiring reburial. Museums classify even recent debris—such as spark plugs and bottle caps—found at ancient sites as funerary objects. Basic archaeological research in Arizona has effectively stopped, with no recent studies drawing on Native remains from the state.

Even more perplexing: the same progressive framework pushing these policies has introduced sex discrimination into curation and fieldwork. Some major research institutions now bar menstruating women from handling remains or artifacts under the banner of “culturally appropriate care,” adopting taboos promoted by tribal activists. These restrictions emerged from universities and museums aligned with progressive causes that otherwise present themselves as champions of women’s rights and equality. Weiss notes that the rules were only reversed at her own institution after she applied legal pressure under Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination.

This contradiction reveals a deeper pattern. Progressive ideology that claims to oppose discrimination and defend science readily imposes religious-style restrictions and shuts down empirical inquiry when those goals conflict with identity-based claims. The result is not only the loss of data on early American diet, disease and migration, but also the quiet acceptance of sex-based barriers in academic spaces that would be loudly condemned in any other context. Weiss argues that these incoherent outcomes stem from academia’s postmodern skepticism of objective truth and the decolonization narratives that flow from it.

Join professor Elizabeth Weiss, Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they examine the social justice movement’s impact on anthropology.

Dr. Elizabeth Weiss is a physical anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at San Jose State University. Follow her on X @EWeissUnburied

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Drug legalization is supposed to spur several critical improvements in public health. As more states legalize recreational marijuana, we’re beginning to see how substantial these benefits are—and the results are underwhelming. A just-published review in The Lancet Psychiatry examining how cannabis policy changes from 2000 to 2025 relate to drug use, addiction and other psychiatric disorders paints a more complicated picture than many legalization advocates have described.

Commercialized legal cannabis markets in Canada and the US were linked to increased cannabis use and addiction among adults. “Since the mid-1990s and especially after 2015,” the review noted, “there has been an increase in the number of people using cannabis daily or near daily in the USA, who now exceed the number of people using alcohol daily or near daily.”

This increase in use has been accompanied by rises in drug potency as cannabis flower is increasingly “displaced by higher potency products that are associated with an increased risk of cannabis use disorder and psychotic disorder.” This is a striking result since legalization is generally thought to produce more predictable, safer drug supplies with fewer harmful effects as sellers begin to operate within the bounds of the law.

These markets also saw increases in hospital admissions for psychosis and for psychotic disorders occurring together with cannabis use disorder. However, there was no consistent evidence of changes in the overall prevalence or incidence of psychotic disorders at the population level. It’s also not clear if marijuana use causes psychosis or if people with psychotic disorders are more inclined to use the drug. Another more perplexing possibility is that cannabis use is both a cause and a result of psychosis in different cases.

In other parts of the world, the results varied with the scale of the changes to drug policy. In Europe, for instance, there was little connection between changes in cannabis regulation and drug use—”This is consistent with the small scale of policy change or commercialization in Europe when compared with the USA or Canada.”

The takeaway for now seems to be that markers of commercialization—retail density, lower prices, higher-potency products, and marketing—track with higher consumption and certain harms. Jurisdictions that restricted commercial influence through tight state controls or non-profit models showed weaker or no such associations. Long-term data remain limited, particularly from low- and middle-income countries, and most studies cover relatively short periods after policy changes.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they scrutinize the results (so far) of marijuana legalization.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Politics has infiltrated every facet of modern life, including medicine. And some Americans seem increasingly inclined to make important health decisions based on their ideological commitments rather than the best evidence. That’s the implication of a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The study, based on the long-running Add Health cohort (born roughly between 1974–1983), found that in the late 2000s there was no meaningful difference in objective health biomarkers (e.g., blood pressure) between self-identified liberals and conservatives. By 2016–2018, however, conservatives (especially “very conservative”) had significantly worse biomarker profiles and comorbidity scores than liberals. This health gap translated into slightly higher mortality for conservatives—six additional deaths—particularly from internal/disease causes like heart disease and cancer.

By 2020–2022, “very conservative” individuals had roughly a 1.1–1.4 percentage point higher probability of internal-cause death than “very liberal” peers. About half the gap was explained by demographic and socioeconomic sorting, while the other half remained unexplained by standard factors. Survey data also showed conservatives reported lower trust in medical advice, lower medication adherence and greater reluctance to seek care. The COVID pandemic response, characterized by confusing, contradictory and often politicized guidance, very likely drove this declining trust in medicine among conservatives.

The authors concluded that political identity may be emerging as a social determinant of health as the public check their beliefs about medicine against their existing ideological filters. Although this idea isn’t implausible and the influence of politics on scientific discourse is undeniable, it remains to be seen whether that incendiary partisan sparring is fueling worse health outcomes for one side of the political spectrum at the population level.

Does being a conservative put you in harm’s way? Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they scrutinize the study’s results.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

E-cigarettes burst onto the scene nearly 20 years, disrupting the cigarette industry and leaving anti-smoking advocates uncertain about how to respond. The devices, now more commonly called “vapes,” looked and functioned like cigarettes, yet they contained no tobacco—supplying users with a low-risk source of vaporized nicotine. A growing body of research has since shown that vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking and can help adult smokers quit their deadly habit. But this conclusion wasn’t obvious at the time.

On the latest episode of the Facts and Fallacies podcast, Cam English and Dr. Liza Lockwood welcome veteran tobacco control advocate Cliff Douglas for a thoughtful discussion on nicotine, vaping and the future of tobacco harm reduction.

With nearly four decades in the field — from helping ban smoking on airplanes to advising the U.S. Surgeon General — Douglas brings a unique perspective. Once deeply embedded in traditional tobacco control, he now champions a science-based, pragmatic approach that recognizes the vast continuum of risk between combustible cigarettes and newer nicotine products.

Douglas highlights dramatic progress: high school smoking rates have plummeted from 36% in the late 1990s to about 1.5% today. Yet he argues that knee-jerk hostility toward vaping and nicotine pouches stems from fear, historical distrust of the tobacco industry and outdated views conflating nicotine with the deadly chemicals in cigarette smoke. He stresses that separating nicotine from combustion creates far safer options.

A powerful theme emerges from a careful survey of the science: harm reduction is both a public health imperative and a social justice issue. Douglas urges meeting smokers where they are, noting that traditional cessation methods fail most people (quit rates hover around 6%). He encourages older smokers especially — whose rates have stagnated — that it’s never too late to switch and improve quality of life.

Cliff Douglas is a public health expert and legal scholar dedicated to reducing death and disease from combustible tobacco use. He was president and CEO of Global Action to End Smoking and director of the Tobacco Research Network at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He held senior roles at the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Surgeon General’s office. Follow him on X @cdoug

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Information, much of it false, spreads at lightning speed in today’s digital age. The problem is more troubling than it may seem at first glance. Many people make important medical decisions, sometimes with fatal consequences, based on claims they see on social media. This raises a question that Americans don’t like to ask: How do we protect open discourse while curbing the flood of dangerous falsehoods? For some scientists, global regulation of internet speech is the most viable solution. “We suggest international law as a potential strategy for bringing about systems-level changes to prevent misinformation,” the authors of a 2025 study on health misinfo concluded.

But critics aren’t convinced. They note that government-coordinated efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic frequently suppressed not just blatant falsehoods but accurate information, such as stories of real vaccine side effects, data on natural immunity, or discussions of breakthrough infections, because officials feared users might “misinterpret” it.

Worse, authorities themselves spread misinformation. Two presidential administrations oversaw a Pentagon operation to deliberately promote anti-vaccine propaganda in developing countries, proving they are unqualified to serve as impartial arbiters of scientific truth. Handing regulatory power to governments and their chosen scientists risks turning debate into dogma: platforms and academics have already mislabeled legitimate research as “misinformation,” chilled scientific inquiry and driven dissent underground.

True scientific progress demands open scrutiny, not top-down control by self-appointed experts who prioritize narrative over evidence, critics add. Censorship erodes public trust far more than imperfect speech ever could.

So who has the upper hand in this incendiary debate? Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they examine one of the most important censorship debates of our time.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Fossil fuels, pesticides and food processing have dramatically improved living standards around the globe. This may be a controversial claim, but it’s difficult to dispute. Inexpensive energy and abundant food are two essential components of the unprecedented economic growth the world experienced over the last century. Yet this is not the message that comes through when certain academic voices talk about these innovations or the industries that produced them. Instead of considering the risks and the benefits of, say, pesticides—e.g., crop yield increases, reduced disease spread—these figures speak exclusively of their potential to cause harm.

Consider this curious New England Journal of Medicine perspective from the University of California, San Francisco’s Center to End Corporate Harm. The article erroneously brands fossil fuels, processed foods, synthetic chemicals and prescription opioids—a diverse array of useful tools when reasonably used—as “corporate vectors” of disease, no different than cigarettes. It urges researchers to weaponize “internal industry documents,” much like the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, to facilitate litigation to cripple the companies that make these products.

The framing is overly simplistic and ideological, collapsing distinct tools and risks into a cartoonish conspiracy of corporate villainy. Tobacco’s decades-long denial of nicotine addiction and cancer risk was uniquely deceptive. Fossil fuels have driven the large gains in global life expectancy by replacing deadly biomass cooking fires and enabling modern agriculture and medicine—benefits the NEJM article largely ignores.

Selective document-mining amounts to hindsight bias and cherry-picking. Every industry keeps internal memos, but when you read the allegedly scandalous documents, they usually don’t reveal nefarious behavior. GLP has reported on multiple cases in recent years confirming this fact (see here and here).

Instead of blanket litigation, proper regulation and evidence-based education continue to offer a more sensible alternative. Demonizing “corporate vectors” is a distraction from the actual causes of our public health challenges.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they examine so-called “health harming industries.”

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

With illicit opioids still killing thousands of Americans each year, some public health advocates are pushing a radical solution to blunt the overdose crisis: safe injection sites. Also known as supervised consumption facilities, these sites allow users to bring their own drugs to consume in a clean, monitored space staffed by medical professionals equipped to reverse overdoses. The sites aim to cut needle-sharing that spreads HIV and hepatitis C, reduce discarded syringes and serve as entry points to counseling and recovery services.

Critics argue the label “safe” is misleading, in part because the facilities normalize illegal drug use instead of confronting addiction. They point to low treatment-referral rates in some studies, which undermine a key justification for safe injection sites, and question whether the facilities reduce overall community overdose deaths. They also highlight studies reporting increases in neighborhood disorder and crime.

In the U.S., federal statutes and local opposition have blocked or delayed many proposals, with skeptics insisting taxpayer resources would be better spent expanding evidence-based treatment, prevention and supply-side enforcement rather than government-sanctioned drug consumption.

Meanwhile, supporters cite data from individual facilities in Canada and Europe, where research shows zero deaths inside facilities and measurable drops in local disease transmission. While some advocates acknowledge the evidence for safe injection sites is preliminary and inconclusive, they contend this uncertainty should drive governments to adequately fund pilot programs and research the efficacy of this controversial harm-reduction technique.

The debate pits compassion against accountability, leaving policymakers and voters divided on whether these sites are worth the risk they may pose to the communities where they’re established.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they dissect the science surrounding the safe injection debate.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish