Talking points
Health: The FDA’s e-cigarette threat
Finally, said David Leonhardt in NYTimes.com, the government is cracking down on the epidemic of teen vaping. While teen smoking has fallen, the kids have flocked to e-cigarettes—2.1 million now use them, 50 percent more than smoke the traditional tobacco kind. They come in teen-friendly fruit flavors; Juul, the leading brand, offers mango and “fruit medley.” Last week the Food and Drug Administration gave the five largest manufacturers of e-cigarettes 60 days to come up with a plan to keep their product away from minors, backed by a threat to force flavored e-cigarettes off the market entirely. Yes, e-cigarettes have helped adults quit smoking, but they still “have the potential to increase diabetes and lung disease, impair brain development, and encourage other forms of drug addiction.” Good for the FDA for taking this small step to prevent the creation of a “new generation of nicotine addicts.”
The agency “has decided to be the Marlboro Man’s best friend,” said Kevin Williamson in NationalReview.com. If the government pulls e-cigarettes off the market for the sake of the children, adult nicotine addicts have a far deadlier alternative available to them: tobacco. It’s the tar and chemicals in cigarettes that kill, not the nicotine, and this “predictably lazy federal approach” will send adults back to smoking. Elite policymakers would rather sacrifice the health of smokers—now mostly the poor—than have to see anything that even looks like smoking. It’s a tradeoff that’s “morally unacceptable and scientifically suspect,” said Jacob Sullum in Reason.com. The FDA’s argument is that “curtailing e-cigarette use by minors” supersedes the right of adults to buy a product that “has great potential for reducing smoking-related disease and death.” But teenagers have been able to get their hands on conventional cigarettes for decades, and the government never banned those. “It cannot possibly justify a ban on competing products that are much safer.”
There’s no way to disprove Juul’s claim that it’s not intentionally appealing to teens, said Jay Evensen in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News. But it doesn’t have to market directly to kids. It just needs to make its products look cool, and teens will get the message. E-cigarettes may be a new technology for delivering nicotine, but makers are following a tobacco-industry ad strategy that hasn’t changed in 60 years. “When kids’ lives are at stake,” do we really have an excuse not to take action?