Didn’t we learn from Prohibition?

Reducing deaths from smoking is a goal everyone shares, and while lowering nicotine levels in cigarettes sounds like a reasonable idea, it carries huge risks for potentially little reward.

Smokers are drawn to cigarettes for the nicotine, but it’s the smoke that kills them. Nicotine doesn’t cause lung cancer, and no real-world evidence suggests that reducing nicotine will lower smoking-related deaths.

Cutting nicotine in cigarettes is, however, a prohibition. Though some of the 36.5 million U.S. smokers might switch to less harmful substitutes, such as e-cigarettes, many would likely purchase cigarettes on the black market.

Conventional cigarettes would still be available worldwide and easily smuggled into the USA, creating an enormous unregulated, untaxed market. If the history of prohibitions is any guide, this would be a boon to organized crime, and law enforcement would have to divert scarce resources to combat it.

Bhutan, which in 2004 became the first and only nation to ban tobacco sales, suffered a boom in tobacco smuggling and has the highest share of smokers in Southeast Asia.

Supporters argue that reducing nicotine will prevent teen addiction to smoking. But this relies on teens obeying the law and not turning to the black market. That’s naive, given that more teens now use marijuana, which is prohibited by federal law, than cigarettes. The policy is also unnecessary, given the decline in teen smoking in 2016 to the lowest level in 25 years.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has made clear that the FDA must support a regulatory framework to reduce smoking. That’s laudable. It’s best achieved by allowing products such as e-cigarettes and heatnot-burn devices — which greatly reduce the risks of smoking but give consumers the nicotine they seek — to enter and remain on the market.

A policy focused on tobacco harm reduction through safer nicotine alternatives would be far more effective than a potentially disastrous prohibition.

Guy Bentley is a consumer freedom research associate at Reason Foundation, which receives some funding from companies that sell cigarettes or other nicotine products.