The FDA says it’s considering lowering the amount of nicotine in tobacco products, in an attempt to lower the rates of dangerous addiction.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The FDA says it’s considering lowering the amount of nicotine in tobacco products, in an attempt to lower the rates of dangerous addiction.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Nicotine will now be at the center of the Food and Drug Administration’s effort to regulate tobacco, the agency said, announcing that it will aim to lower the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to a level that will help curb addiction.
It would be the first time in the agency’s history that it has sought to regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.
“The 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,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Friday. “Unless we change course, 5.6 million young people alive today will die prematurely later in life from tobacco use.”
The plan had an immediate effect on the stock market.
“It’s a real blow to big tobacco,” NPR’s Rob Stein says. “There’s no question about that. And tobacco stocks have already started to fall” after Friday’s announcement.
The policy will also apply to vaping and electronic cigarettes, although makers of those and other newly regulated products will be given more time to submit them for review.
Under the new timeline, the FDA said, makes of cigars, pipe tobacco and hookah tobacco would have until Aug. 8, 2021 to submit applications, while makers of non-combustible products such as ENDS or e-cigarettes would be submitted by Aug. 8, 2022.
“Tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, causing more than 480,000 deaths every single year,” the FDA said in announcing the plan. The agency added that the toll also has a monetary cost, with “direct health care and lost productivity costs totaling nearly $300 billion a year.”