Author Archives: Mark Gottlieb

About Mark Gottlieb

Mark Gottlieb joined the staff of the Public Health Advocacy Institute in 1993 after graduating from Northeastern University School of Law. His efforts have focused on researching tobacco litigation as a public health strategy as director of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, reducing the harm caused by secondhand tobacco smoke through a variety of legal and policy approaches, fostering scholarship using tobacco industry documents, and, more recently, examining legal and policy approaches to address obesity. He is the Executive Director of the Institute and lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife and three children.

PHAI to Host International Webinar on the Myth of the Responsible Gambling Model

It’s Not the Dough, it’s the Dopamine:
The Dangerous Myth of the Responsible Gambling Model

How the gambling industry misleads regulators and imperils the public’s health. . . and what we can do about it

An unprecedented Zoom event during Problem Gambling Awareness Month

March 15, 2023 from 1:00 – 3:00 PM EDT

Presenters:

Dick Daynard, University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, has long been at the forefront of an international movement to establish the legal responsibility of the tobacco industry for tobacco-induced death, disease and disability. He is president of the law school’s Public Health Advocacy Institute, chairs its Tobacco Products Liability Project and helped initiate its Center for Public Health Litigation. Recently, he has worked with PHAI on issues involving obesity, gambling, opioids, gun control and e-cigarettes.

 
Jim Orford is Emeritus Professor of Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Birmingham. His books on addiction include Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addictions and An Unsafe Bet?: The Dangerous Rise of Gambling and the Debate We Should Be Having, and, most recently, The Gambling Establishment: Challenging the Power of the Modern Gambling Industry and its Allies, published by Routledge in 2019. 

 Mark Petticrew is director of the National Institute of Health and Care’s Public Health Research Unit and Faculty of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he heads the Department of Public Health, Environments and Society. His research on commercial determinants of health extends from alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and fast food to gambling.

Matt Gaskell is a consultant psychologist and a clinical lead for addictions for the Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and serves as clinical lead for the National Health Service Northern Gambling Service.


Liz Ritchie, along with her husband Charles, founded Gambling with Lives in 2018 to support bereaved families, raise awareness of the devastating effects of Gambling Disorder, and campaign for change.
Will Prochaska is the Strategy Director for the charity.

Harry Levant of Ethos Treatment, LLC is an Internationally Certified Gambling Counselor and policy advocate working with people and families struggling with gambling disorder; also a person with lived-experience in recovery from gambling addiction, and a doctoral student at Northeastern University who researches the impact of gambling on public health.

Mark Gottlieb is the executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston where he teaches public health advocacy. His research and advocacy have focused on tobacco litigation as a public health strategy, examining legal and policy approaches to food policy, and considering public health approaches to gambling and gun violence.

Register today

Richard Daynard, publishes op-ed explaining the importance of punitive damages awards for public health

Northeastern University Distinguished Professor of Law and President of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, Richard Daynard, published an op-ed in The Hill on December 6, 2022 laying out the importance of punitive damages in civil justice to protect public health.

Professor Richard Daynard
Professor Richard Daynard

The article references a billion dollar punitive damages verdict in a Massachusetts tobacco case from September in which PHAI’s Center for Public Health Litigation participated. The case involved a a wrongful death claim by the family of a woman who smoked Marlboro and Parliament cigarettes for many years and who was addicted to cigarette smoking as a teen. Barbara Fontaine died as a result of lung cancer at the age of 60.

The jury listened to 3 weeks of evidence of the culpability of Philip Morris, USA in Ms. Fontaine’s death including testimony from a historian, an addiction expert, and a lung cancer expert. Compensatory damages of $8 million were awarded by the Middlesex County, Massachusetts jury. The jury also learned about the enormous profits that Philip Morris USA derives from cigarette sales to this day and, in order to punish and deter its reprehensible conduct, issued a punitive damages verdict of $1 billion.

Daynard argues that such large punitive damages awards are needed where a corporation is so profitable in an enterprise that harms population health that a smaller award is simply as cost of doing business.

The Center for Public Health Litigation at PHAI returns to the courtroom for a wrongful death tobacco trial in Boston against Philip Morris as well as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco in January.

Professor Daynard’s opinion piece can be accessed through this link.

PHAI’s Gottlieb Discusses Recent Juul Settlement

On September 6, 2022, attorneys general from 33 states announced a tentative settlement of their joint investigation of the company involving cash payments to the states of $438.5 million over several years. PHAI’s executive director, Mark Gottlieb, discussed the settlement on NBC News NOW the following morning. That short interview can be seen here.

Boston Globe Publishes Op-Ed on Sports Gambling by PHAI’s Daynard and Gottlieb

On August 15, 2022, the Boston Globe published an op-ed written by PHAI president, Richard Daynard, PHAI executive director, Mark Gottlieb, and Northeastern University Law and Policy doctoral student, Harry Levant. The subject of the piece is the public health threat posed by sports betting with continuous action.

The piece is titled: Massachusetts makes a losing bet on gambling. A bill legalizing sports gambling was signed into law on August 10th in Massachusetts and the authors urge the regulatory agency, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, to lower the risk of addiction that sports gambling offering bettors constant action can pose.

Gambling Disorder is an addiction not unlike addictions to drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Allowing legal betting on every play of every game of every sporting event is not a responsible way to regulate these products. The authors note that, “rigorous enforcement of age restrictions, barring in-game betting, regulating advertising, and creating basic affordability checks can eliminate most of the problems that all too often turn fun into tragedy and despair.”

The op-ed can be viewed here.

Bloomberg Spotlights PHAI’s United On Guns

Bloomberg has published an article in its CityLab section focusing on the Mass Shooting Playbook and 24 Hour Protocol published by PHAI’s gun violence prevention initiative, UnitedOnGuns. The article is titled: What Should Mayors Do After Mass Shootings?

With the tragedy of frequent mass shootings in the United States, the role of mayors to help prepare for, respond to, and recover from these events has become evident. The Playbook and Protocol are important tools for mayors and municipal leaders to be as prepared as possible should their communities join the list of those affected by mass shooting.

And the mass shootings continue

It is very sad that municipal leaders need to think about – not if – but when a mass shooting occurs, how should my community prepare, respond, and recover? PHAI’s UnitedOnGuns Initiative has the resources to help mayors and city managers to be ready for these tragedies. These include a Mass Shooting Protocol and Mass Shooting Playbook.

The Protocol is a four-page overview of a mayor’s role during the first 24 hours after a mass shooting. The Playbook is a 200-page resource guide informed by the recommendations and experience of mayors who have responded to a mass shooting.

UnitedOnGuns’ Director, Sarah Peck, was interviewed about these resources on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on May 21, 2022 regarding the mass shooting in Buffalo, NY and on May 26, 2022 in the wake of the mass murders in the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Admittedly, these resources produced by PHAI will not solve any of the structural problems that cause mass shootings, but they can help communities to be prepared and to mitigate some of the horror of these all too common events.

PHAI’s Sarah Peck Publishes Op-Ed on Long-Term Impact of Pulse Nightclub Shooting

Pulse Victims

In an op-ed published today in the Orlando Sentinel, Sarah Peck, director of PHAI’s #UnitedOnGuns initiative along with Northeastern Professor James Alan Fox consider the impact of lingering trauma from the horrific Pulse Nightclub shooting, which occurred 5 years ago on June 12, 2016.

Peck and Fox note that the psychological toll on survivors, families, first responders, and others in the community is substantial and long-lasting. Recovery requires time and resources. Unfortunately, Florida Governor DeSantis has slashed funding for families and survivors of the attach who are in need of recovery services. These needs are not only relevant to the Pulse Shooting survivors and families, but to those of all mass shootings.

In many ways, the recovery response of Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer has been a model, but continued funding is needed to assist with recovery services that are still needed more than five years after such a traumatic and tragic event.

Read the full op-ed here.

PHAI’s Sarah Peck Looks at Suicide Prevention as a Way to Reduce Mass Shootings in Op-Ed

PHAI’s Sarah Peck, director of #UnitedOnGuns, along with James Alan Fox, the Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University, published an opinion piece in the Mercury News of San Jose, where a tragic public mass shooting at a light rail yard resulted in 10 deaths, including a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the shooter. Peck and Fox note that public mass shootings almost inevitably involve suicidal ideation on the part of the shooter.  They write that this fact, “provides hope that some of these horrific crimes can be prevented by focusing specifically on suicide prevention.”

In fact, focusing on suicide prevention may be the most effective way to reduce death caused by guns in the U.S. as nearly 2 out of 3 gun deaths are the result of suicides. In the various gun narratives, this is hardly a dominant theme.  Nor it the fact, pointed out by the authors, that, “the risk a household member will commit suicide is increased threefold when there is a gun in the home.” Peck and Fox recommend 2 policies to help reduce gun-involved suicides.

1) Temporarily remove a firearm when a household member is in crisis, and

2) Safely secure handguns and long guns bought for sport or protection, especially if there is a minor in the home.

The first of these policies is known as a “red flag” law or “extreme risk protection order” (ERPO).  Evidence to date suggests that ERPO laws may, indeed, help to reduce suicide. Guns as, by far, the most effective means of successfully carrying out a suicide attempt. Research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that while, overall the 8.5% of suicide attempts result in death, 89.7% of suicide attempts involving guns are lethal. Safe storage of guns have been found to reduce gun-related injuries and death.

Read the commentary here.

After FDA’s Menthol Announcement, PHAI’s Gottlieb and Daynard Consider Next Steps

 

In an op-ed published today in the Boston Globe, a day in which FDA announced it’s intention to issue regulations to ban menthol cigarettes, PHAI’s executive director and president consider what the next steps in tobacco prevention should be.

Gottlieb and Daynard suggest that:

  1. The FDA should also remove menthol flavored e-cigarettes from the market.  If these products, favored by youth, are on the market to help menthol smokers switch to e-cigarettes, this will not be necessary once menthol cigarettes are gone.
  2. Nicotine must be carefully regulated so that cigarettes are no longer addictive.  The evidence is that very low nicotine cigarettes will help smokers to quit and will not result in them increasing smoking to compensate.
  3. The nicotine strength in American e-cigarettes is more than double the maximum allowed in Europe.  There is no public health rationale for e-cigarettes to be this addictive and the FDA should regulate them accordingly.
  4. Finally, the end of the public health crisis caused by tobacco industry products will only come when we plan to phase out their sales entirely to establish a tobacco-free generation.  Brookline, Massachusetts is the first community in the nation to approve this policy and is poised to prohibit sales of any tobacco products to anyone born on or before January 1, 2000. This slow phase-out is a reasonable and permanent way sunset these lethal and addictive products permanently. It should be widely adopted.

UnitedOnGuns’ Sarah Peck and Northeastern’s James Alan Fox Consider Federal Policy to Help Mayors Deal with Mass Shootings

In an op-ed published today in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Sarah Peck, director of PHAI’s #UnitedOnGuns initiative along with Northeastern Professor James Alan Fox take a very practical approach to help mayors respond to mass shooting events, which have become all too common. While federal legislation mandating universal background checks and other measures remain trapped in political gridlock, local mayors continue to be called upon to respond to mass shootings in their communities. In addition to the physical and emotional tolls that such an event may cause, mayors soon learn that the financial costs of responding to such a tragedy can be immense.

Peck and Fox make specific recommendations:

We urge the president to support Mr. Weaver [Mayor of Boulder] and all the mayors who will follow him by: (1) establishing an emergency fund for cities to cover the full cost of responding to a mass public shooting with management and oversight from FEMA or another appropriate agency; (2) providing mental health services for police officers and other first responders; and (3) creating training for mayors and other city managers to prepare for, respond to, and assist their communities to recover from a mass shooting.