More Smokers
That’s what the drive to ban vaping will yield
FOR the first time in 20 years, smoking rates are on the rise. That mournful finding ought to be reinvigorating the effort to stamp out cigarettes. Astoundingly, the opposite is happening.
A new tax on nicotine vaping, which Democrats have tried to inject into the Build Back Better bill, would drag more than 2.5 million Americans back to cigarettes, according to National Institutes of Health-funded academic research. And just weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration effectively outlawed nearly all vaping products, though they’ve proven to be the single most effective method to quit smoking ever devised.
President Biden’s nominee to head the FDA, Dr. Robert Califf, helped craft that hardline policy in his brief Obamaera stint at the agency. His Tuesday conf irmation hearing suggests he’ll easily end up in the post again.
So are public-health advocates up in arms? Nope. They too seem bent on destroying the nascent vaping industry, loudly urging the FDA to issue more “market denial orders” to deprive millions of Americans of the right to switch from smoking to the vastly safer alternative of vaping.
More than 400,000 Americans lose their lives each year to smoking-related illnesses while not a single person has died from vaping nicotine. Yet groups like the American Lung Association and American Medical Association have called for a total ban on vaping products but say nothing about the spike in cigarette smoking — even though vaping taxes and bans are directly correlated with increased smoking rates.
Little wonder that stocks for the leading tobacco companies are all on the rise and analysts are bullish that vaping crackdowns will continue that trend.
If the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalitions of the 20th-century Prohibition era seemed uncanny, today’s partnership between moralizing nanny-staters and the cigarette business is truly sinister.
In this version of the economic fable, the prohibitionists are being paid directly by sales of the vice. That’s because the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between tobacco companies and state governments provides a lavish and perpetual cut of cigarette revenue to state and federal agencies along with activist groups to cheer on the bureaucrats.
Incredibly, the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products is bankrolled entirely by tobacco user fees, averaging more than half a billion each year. Each state gets huge annual payoffs, too — so long as people keep buying cigarettes.
It doesn’t take a degree in public-choice theory to see how that pipeline of cash can warp the incentives for public-health officials, who are supposed to be strictly reliant on clinical objectivity. The more cigarettes sold, the more cash the government gets.
That’s the same problem with Califf, the White House’s nominee to head the FDA: He’s a longtime consultant for a host of leading pharmaceutical firms that market smoking-cessation products. Senators at Califf ’s confirmation hearing would’ve been right to ask why those companies are permitted to sell lucrative nicotine-replacement therapies that are far less effective than nicotine vaping, which he wishes to prohibit.
Senators can still ask written questions, and they might also query him on the FDA’s baffling arguments this month in the first vaping case considered by the Supreme Court. The agency has said that its makeshift marketapproval process poses “a genuine risk” to public health by forcing adult vapers who have quit cigarettes back into smoking, which the FDA says “should be avoided if at all possible.” But at the very same time, the FDA is doing its utmost to strangle the vaping industry, threaten retailers and scare the wits out of the public with grossly distorted “fear appeals.”
While they are at it, senators might also seek testimony from the man who has spent more time and money lobbying the FDA to ban vaping than anyone: America’s nanny-in-chief, Michael Bloomberg. In the 1920s, Prohibition’s chief paladin was an ornery grandmother named Carrie Nation who toted a hatchet, convinced that God had ordered her to smash beer barrels.
Today that mantle is held by Bloomberg, a self-anointed moralist who has spent many hundreds of millions to bankroll an army of lobbyists, PR agencies and front groups in his anti-vaping crusade.
The more than 15 million Americans who use vaping products would cheer to the rafters to see those gentlemen finally face tough questions for denying Americans the freedom to switch from cigarettes to vaping and take control of their own health destinies.