Co-sponsored by the departments of History and Anthropology, Dr. Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas) will give the talk “Communism, Capitalism, and Addiction: The History of Smoking in the USSR." Dr. Starks has written widely about public health and this project was supported by an NSF grant. It is based on her award-winning book, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking the USSR and on her talk at the Alan Berkman Memorial Lecture at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Starks breaks down the assumed links in the west between tobacco use and ubiquitous advertising, nefarious product manipulation, and hi-tech industrial design. By showing how Soviet smoking continued under communism without sophisticated or sustained use of any of these capitalist techniques, Starks challenges current assumptions about how best to pursue cessation and fight an addiction that still ensnares nearly one in four adults worldwide to a product that results in the death of half its users.