TPA Opposes Misguided FDA Policy That Won’t Protect Americans from the Dangers of Tobacco Smoke

For Immediate Release                                                                             Contact: Abigail Graham: (202) 417-7235

June 21, 2022                                              

Washington, D.C. – On Tuesday, June 21, The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration would issue a new ruling to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that would require tobacco companies to reduce nicotine content in combustible cigarettes to “minimally or nonaddictive levels.” The Post reports that the new rule is in alignment with the President’s “cancer moonshot program,” which aims to reduce cancer-related disease and death.

As a leading think tank in promoting adult access to harm reduction, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s (TPA) Consumer Center finds the announcement misguided. TPA also urges the administration to require the FDA to move forward with other regulatory actions designed to increase adult access to safer tobacco alternatives, rather than issuing additional regulations that don’t help smokers quit.

Lindsey Stroud, Director of TPA’s Consumer Center, offered the following statement:

“Clearly, the demonization of nicotine is pervasive in this administration, despite decades of evidence finding that it is the smoke – not nicotine – that causes the most harm in combustible cigarettes.

“The FDA is overwhelmingly burdened with numerous regulations already required by the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, including graphic warnings and approving hundreds of thousands of novel tobacco products, namely e-cigarettes, through the agency’s exhaustive premarket tobacco product application process. Further, the agency announced new rules earlier this year that seek to ban menthol in combustible cigarettes and flavors in cigars.

“Rather than burdening the agency with even more regulations that are nothing more than thinly veiled bans, Biden and his administration should look at the decades of science on the reduced harms of novel tobacco harm reduction products and urge the FDA to get these into the hands of the estimated 30.8 million American adults that continue to smoke.”

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Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.