The Biden administration this week launched a broadside against Big Tobacco in an effort to break its hold over millions of Americans. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced it will seek a rule forcing dramatic reduction in the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, to render them less addictive and make it easier for smokers to quit. It won’t be easy to implement — cigarette manufacturers will view it as an existential fight, and their political allies will join them. But with some 1,300 Americans a day dying from tobacco-related causes, it’s a fight worth having.
Close to a half-million Americans die annually from the effects of smoking (or second-hand smoke), making it the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S. Virtually no smoker today is unaware of the health risks — they’ve been widely known to the public for generations — but the addictive nature of cigarettes keeps them puffing. The addiction comes primarily from nicotine, a naturally occurring substance in tobacco that isn’t dangerous in itself, but which creates a craving that keeps smokers hooked and vulnerable to the hundreds of known hazardous chemicals in each cigarette.
The FDA announcement is the beginning of what will almost certainly be a yearslong effort to force the cigarette companies to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to “minimally addictive or non-addictive levels,” as the agency put it in a posted statement. The stated goal is to reduce “the likelihood that future generations of young people become addicted to cigarettes and help more currently addicted smokers to quit.”
