The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to prevent smoking-related deaths by making cigarettes less appealing. To this end, the FDA plans to ban menthol cigarettes and limiting nicotine content to “reduce cigarette addiction”.
Meanwhile, the FDA seems determined to make vaping products, the most promising alternative to cigarettes, less appealing to smokers. The perverse combination of these two regulatory strategies would undermine public health in the name of its promotion.
The FDA says menthol cigarettes are particularly addictive, especially to black smokers, who overwhelmingly prefer them. The evidence for this is flimsy, as is the patronizing assumption that African Americans are powerless to resist the minty freshness of menthol or the marketing that touts it. Worse, the proposed ban would promote illegal production and distribution, inviting a law enforcement response that would disproportionately harm the people the agency claims to be trying to help — a point the FDA implicitly concedes by making alluding to the “racial and social justice implications” of the policy. “
Imposing a reduction in nicotine also raises obvious problems. This policy would also stimulate black market activity and encourage current consumers to smoke more, which hardly appears to be in line with the FDA’s stated goals.
The same could be said of the FDA’s refusal to approve vaping products in flavors other than tobacco. Although the agency considers alternative flavors dangerously appealing to teens, surveys indicate that the vast majority of ex-smokers who vape prefer them.
So far, the FDA has only approved vaping products with tobacco flavors. It rejected millions of requests for other flavors, including menthol. Yet his cost-benefit analysis of the proposed ban on menthol cigarettes assumes the availability of alternatives to e-cigarettes.
This analysis, notes Michelle Minton, senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, which publishes this magazine, is based on a study in which replacing “high-risk combustible menthol cigarettes” with “menthol-flavored nicotine vapor products low risk” accounts for “about half of the benefits.” How are menthol smokers supposed to make this switch if the FDA won’t let them buy menthol flavored e-cigarettes?
The FDA’s bias against flavor variety is difficult to reconcile with its recognition that vaping has great potential to reduce smoking-related illness and death. Banning flavors preferred by adult consumers will encourage some people to start smoking again and discourage current smokers from switching.
This policy, like a ban on menthol cigarettes and a nicotine limit, will also push consumers towards black market vendors, who are completely unconstrained by supposedly enlightened FDA regulations. The FDA apparently learned nothing from the country’s unfortunate experience with the war on drugs.
This article originally appeared under the title “The FDA’s Evil Nicotine Plans”.