What an amazing coincidence.
I’m not sure what to make of this story and I’m still digesting it. The biggest issue I have is I trust nothing to come out of the Trump administration.
The FDA today stated it’s planning regulations to cut the level of nicotine in cigarettes to “non-addictive levels.”
The best news about this? Tobacco stocks absolutely tanked after the FDA announcement. That tells me the industry and stockholders are nervous about the idea of cigarettes with non-addictive levels of nicotine.
It sounds great on the surface, but again, this is a Trump appointee making this announcement and this is an administration that is downright hostile to the scientific community. So, colour me initially skeptical. Sure enough, the new FDA director, Scott Gottlieb, actually was involved in the vaping industry. So, are these new rules designed to push smokers from tobacco to vaping? (Not the worst thing in the world, but again … yet again, sure enough, the new FDA chief appears to possibly have a hidden agenda. I trust no one in this administration.).
A Gottlieb quote:
“[An] overwhelming amount of death and disease attributable to tobacco is caused by addiction to cigarettes—the only legal consumer product that, when used as intended, will kill half of all long-term users,” Scott Gottlieb, FDA Commissioner, said in a statement. “Unless we change course, 5.6 million young people alive today will die prematurely later in life from tobacco use.” The center of this effort, he says, must be a shared vision for “a world where cigarettes would no longer create or sustain addiction, and where adults who still need or want nicotine could get it from alternative and less harmful sources.”
Anyway, the FDA is suggesting somehow phasing this in over several years.
One of the arguments I’ve heard against lowering the level of nicotine — and I have no idea if there’s scientific validity to this argument — is that if you cut the level of nicotine in a cigarette, that will end up forcing people to smoke more cigarettes to get the same level of nicotine.
Is that how it would work in real life? I don’t know. Could be hogwash. But, I do see some common sense in that argument.
What was kind of fun is Altria’s stocks dropped 17 percent after the announcement was made, while British American Tobacco’s stock dropped 13 percent. Investors were immediately panicked about the whole thing.
Interestingly, if the rules are designed to push smokers toward vaping, guess who controls 75 percent of the vaping market? Yup — Altria, BAT and R.J. Reynolds.
What an amazing coincidence. The same people selling the disease are also primarily selling the cure.
Anyway, the FDA was looking at imposing new regulations on the vaping industry that many in the industry claimed would push out the smaller companies and just allow Big Tobacco to have an even bigger stranglehold on the market. Those regulations are now being put off until 2022. Again, kind of an amazing coincidence.
By the way, in reading comments to this news, I see there’s still a lot of misinformation about nicotine. Nicotine is not a benign substance, it increases a person’s blood pressure and can be fatal in large doses. But, it also isn’t the substance that causes lung cancer. That’s the 4,000 other chemicals such as benzene, arsenic, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, Polonium-210 and others.
But, nicotine is the substance that physically addicts the smoker so they can’t quit. So, it definitely has a role to play in making cigarettes so deadly.
Anyway, still chewing it all over. It certainly took me completely by surprise.