Earlier this month, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced sweeping new rules governing e-cigarettes and tobacco in the United States. The most striking change is a ban on the sale of most flavored e-cigarettes in retail locations that admit minors, which will limit most in-person sales to specialty retailers like vape shops and tobacconists. The FDA also announced its intention to eventually ban menthol cigarettes and all forms of flavored cigars.
More worryingly, these moves may pave the way for even more radical regulations that would, in essence, make it illegal to sell the combustible tobacco products favored by cigarette and cigar smokers throughout the United States.
The new vaping rules fall short of the stricter interventions favored by many anti-smoking activists. But even though Gottlieb is a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who was appointed by Donald Trump with the expectation that he would champion deregulatory policies, his longer term plans align the FDA with the most strident anti-smoking groups. In addition to banning menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, Gottlieb is steering the FDA toward mandating low nicotine yields in combusted tobacco, a regulatory intervention that would effectively outlaw most traditional tobacco products.
Paired with his support for e-cigarettes, the policies evolving at the FDA break down the standard framing of debates within tobacco control, which typically pits advocates of harm reduction against abstinence-only hardliners. The newly emerging division is between those who embrace a liberal, dynamic approach to regulation and aggressive interventionists who advocate technocratic central planning of the tobacco market. Despite his intellectual ties to free market think tanks, Gottlieb increasingly looks like a radical restrictionist out to ban the sale of smoking products as we now know them forever.
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