The Supreme Court heard the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) appeal in Food and Drug Administration v. Wages and White Lion Investments, LLC on Monday. The case concerns the FDA's requirement for scientific studies to approve premarket tobacco applications (PMTAs) for flavored electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) manufacturers and distributors. The FDA's requirement contradicts data and years of its own guidance for the end of reducing an exaggerated epidemic of underage nicotine use.
Concerns about rampant teen nicotine use are common. They are also commonly exaggerated. NPR originally claimed that "the percentage of high school kids who reported daily vaping of e-cigarettes jumped from 9.7% in 2014 to 30% in 2023." (The outlet has since printed a correction.) What the FDA and CDC's 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey actually said was that 29.9 percent of high schoolers currently using e-cigarette were daily users; only 10 percent of all high schoolers were current users, (down from 14.1 percent in 2022), 90.3 percent of whom used flavored products. If "e-cigarettes have filled the vacuum" left by smoking, as former FDA deputy commissioner William Schultz says to NPR, the vacuum is not as large as people are led to believe.
