House Moves to Regulate Unregulated Drug Delivery Systems

With the support of cigarette manufacturer Phillip Morris USA, the House voted Wednesday to approve legislation that would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. According to The New York Times, the bill would give the FDA the authority to stipulate nicotine levels allowed in cigarettes sold to consumers, and the agency could mandate a nonaddictive threshold for the chemical.

Writing about the legislation in March, Michael Stebbins noted that without the ability to ban nicotine outright, the FDA would not have sufficient power:

A superficial glance at the bill reveals that it fails the logic test by requiring an agency charged with protecting the health of Americans with regulating a deadly product without the authority to ban it outright. But the alternative, of leaving Big Tobacco to freely manipulate their product to keep me and the rest of my stinky-fingered brethren addicted, is unacceptable.

Stebbins notes as well that “In the United States, cigarette smoking is responsible for about one in five deaths annually, or about 438,000 deaths per year; on average, these people die 13 years younger than non-smokers.” Moreover, “Annually, cigarette smoking costs more than $167 billion, based on lost productivity ($92 billion) and health care expenditures ($75.5 billion).” “Cigarettes,” he points out, “are unregulated drug delivery systems.”

With the ability to regulate tobacco, FDA could better protect the health of Americans and prevent young people from becoming early smokers. But if the lessons from past battles with the tobacco industry are any lesson, there may be fights on the horizon to defend the science that will put teeth in FDA’s authority. As David Michaels, author of Doubt Is Their Product, noted in an interview earlier this year, there are many industry tricks of the trade that “turn positive studies into negative ones or take one positive study and do a literature review which buries the positive study in what is essentially a whole mass of garbage so it looks like there is nothing there.” Let’s hope that legal arguments over the precise levels levels of nicotine allowed in cigarettes do not obscure the fact that the product kills.

Tags: FDA, public health

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