Bureaucrats and Big Tobacco Attack the Vaping Industry

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has joined forces with Big Tobacco to crush small businesses, effectively dismantling much of the vaping industry. In this process, bureaucrats are endangering the lives of millions.

Clearly, this makes little sense. But the story doesn’t start here. In May of this year, the FDA announced it would regulate e-cigarettes and tobacco products that do not contain tobacco. This is a significant change: it means that the FDA estimates that e-cigarette products now face approval fees ranging from $265,000 to $2.6 million, with each application taking 1,713 hours. And these estimates are not for each e-cigarette company; they are for each project.

For the nascent e-cigarette industry, which mainly consists of small manufacturers and shops, these barriers are likely to lead to closures. For Big Tobacco, this is a clever strategy: impose high regulatory fees, weather the storm, watch your competition sink, and emerge as the largest new supplier of original products.

Big Tobacco's foothold in the e-market is realized through their retreat on two fronts: (1) long-time smokers using e-cigarettes to help them quit, and (2) young people using e-cigarettes instead of starting to smoke.

E-cigarettes deliver nicotine but do not contain the nearly 7,000 chemicals associated with 60 carcinogens found in real cigarettes. This has led, among other observations, Public Health England, a UK government agency, to conclude that e-cigarettes are 95% safer than cigarettes.

U.S. officials believe otherwise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) argues that e-cigarettes lead people to start smoking rather than stop, citing two studies as support. The issue is not that the studies align with the CDC's position on e-cigarettes. In fact, we explicitly state: “We cannot conclude that e-cigarette use directly leads to smoking.” (Read the in-depth analysis here.)

It is also worth mentioning that the CDC overlooks two significant facts. In 2015, youth smoking in the U.S. dropped to single digits for the first time, while smoking rates rose in states that banned e-cigarettes.

Between FDA regulations and the CDC's cheerleading, bureaucrats are obstructing effective harm reduction strategies while handing giant checks to Big Tobacco.

For more, you can read the September edition of “Green Observations” here.

This blog post is adapted from the first part of the September edition of “Green Observations” by Stephen J. Allen.