Your Lung Cancer Brought To You By Bureaucrats At The FDA
The FDA, bless their little bureaucratic little lump of coal hearts, are doing their darndest to protect Big Cigarette from all the vape entrepreneurs who were poised to eat a good bit of their business.
At Cato, vaper Trevor Burris writes:
Big tobacco is jumping for joy. Like many big businesses, they were slow to see the wave of change that was coming. But once they saw it, they jumped on it. Altria (Philip Morris) only recently purchased a prominent e-cig manufacturer, and they've long supported the FDA's regulation of "tobacco products" because "an increasing number of scientists and public health officials are advocating for more clear communications about the relative risks of tobacco products so adult tobacco consumers can make informed choices about them."Language like that is just an anti-competitive catechism. They say "consumer choice and confidence," but it is really about putting competitors out of business through onerous regulations and requirements that only big tobacco has the resources to satisfy.
At CEI, Michelle Minton writes:
E-cigarettes could lead to a 21 percent decline in deaths from smoking-related diseases for people born after 1997, according to a study published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. Even accounting for harms people might suffer from vaping who would have otherwise not smoked at all, the researchers found a net public health gain from the presence of e-cigarettes. So why is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration putting up big regulatory barriers for e-cigarettes starting in August?The reason is simple: regulator over-caution. The FDA isn't publicly blamed for the people who suffer and die because a drug, product or service wasn't available due to their slow and prohibitively expensive approval process. It is, however, blamed for products that cause harm 20 or 30 years down the line. So, regulators err on the side of caution.
...The risks of smoking traditional cigarettes far outweigh the risks of vaping. Both contain nicotine, which is an addictive substance, but itself may be no more harmful that caffeine and might even have some benefits. But cigarettes kill 50 percent or more of its users. Vaping, though a relatively new product category, is estimated to be 95 percent less harmful than traditional tobacco products.
...Yet, beginning on August 8, the FDA will treat these two very different products in functionally the same way. Manufacturers and importers will have two years to gain FDA approval for every device, component and e-liquid formula; a process that takes hundreds to thousands of man-hours and can cost up to $1 million per application. By the FDA's own estimate, 99 percent of the current products on the market will not receive approval from the FDA and will disappear from the market.
The purpose of the Tobacco Control Act -- which gave the FDA power to regulate tobacco -- was to "provide new and flexible enforcement authority" and to aid the industry's attempts to "develop, introduce and promote less harmful tobacco products."
Yet, with this new rule the FDA is doing is exactly the opposite. As my organization's founder Fred Smith once quipped, perhaps it's the FDA that should come with a warning label, not e-cigarettes.
American health advocates should be raising a stink about the damage these new rules will do to public health. But instead they worry about vaping "re-normalizing" cigarette smoking, which they worked so hard to make taboo.
...FDA's fears about vaping products are certainly not baseless. Though they've been around for about a decade and are safer than cigarettes, the long-term effects of vaping aren't known. What is known, however, is that millions of people will die because of their addiction to traditional cigarettes unless they quit or switch to another product and the FDA's new rules will make switching more expensive, less attractive and less likely.
So, no, we don't know the ins and outs of the dangerous of vaping. What seems clear is that vaping is far safer than smoking.
Cigarettes are highly addictive and wildly bad for people's health -- and so is the FDA, with this protectionism for the cigarette bigs.
The way to actually protect Americans -- those who are unlikely to throw up their hands tomorrow and quit smoking -- is to opt for the less tested but obviously less unhealthy option.
Don't the states still get a cut of Big Tobacco profits?
Ben at August 17, 2016 6:21 AM
Depends on how they structured Big Tobacco's lawsuit settlements. If it was a lump sum payment, then no. If it is on-going payments, then yes.
Don't forget that they tax tobacco products at high rates, and I'm doubtful they could get away with taxing vaping fluids at those rates.
Remember: this is nothing more dangerous than a state legislator who's high on sin taxes.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 17, 2016 7:30 AM
It's still weird to see people walking around with their cherry flavored binky and puffing out huge clouds of residue.
Canvasback at August 17, 2016 12:25 PM
Michelle Minton begins her piece with the sentence "E-cigarettes could lead to a 21 percent decline in deaths from smoking-related diseases for people born after [emphasis mine] 1997, according to a study published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research." I found that article online, and Michelle Minton is a liar. Nicotine & Tobacco research accepted the article "The Application of a Decision-Theoretic Model to Estimate the Public Health Impact of Vaporized Nicotine Product Initiation in the United States." abstract and full article. The abstract begins, "The public health impact of vaporized nicotine products (VNPs) such as e-cigarettes is unknown at this time." In other words, "we don't know, but we will make educated guesses." The key sentence upon which Minton relies is, "Based on current use patterns and conservative assumptions, we project a reduction of 21% in smoking-attributable deaths and of 20% in life years lost as a result of VNP use by the 1997 US birth cohort compared to a scenario without VNPs." So, the conclusion about a projected decline in deaths applies to those born in 1997, not those born after 1997. People born in 1997 are already 19 years old, and are unlikely to start smoking if they haven't already. Some 90% of all smokers start before their 18th birthday. If FDA regulations lead to fewer non-smokers taking up VPNs, in the long run fewer people will die of nicotine-related diseases. Shame on Michelle Minton for lying about the article in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, and shame on CEI for printing it without doing even 5 minutes of fact checking, and shame on this blog for not fact checking it either.
Joel Rubinstein at August 17, 2016 12:57 PM
Shame on the FDA and the government for lying about secondhand smoke based on a few reports with very questionable facts as well. Anybody can read any report any way they want it.
My son seems much healthier since he switched to e-cigs. Now the nannies at the FDA want to fuck that up. Fuck them.
DrCos at August 18, 2016 10:04 AM
A lot of vapers use mixtures that don't contain nicotine. DIY mixtures are getting pretty common, from what I've seen. As far as actually cutting down on vaping, this in itself will probably render the FDA's efforts ineffective.
I think it's at best premature to conclude that vaping attracts non-smokers. I'm not aware of any data on that, and I think that such data would be difficult to collect. How do you know who "would have been" a smoker? It's like going to the percentage of the population that has never taken heroin and asking who "would have been" a heroin addict if they had ever tried it.
Cousin Dave at August 18, 2016 11:25 AM
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