On March 5, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced he is resigning at the end of the month. Despite the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, Gottlieb’s FDA has been a stark exception, repeatedly increasing the regulatory scrutiny for new e-vapor products and threatening to take existing products off the market in response to an increase in underage vaping.
Unfortunately, any sigh of relief the vaping industry breathed at Gottlieb’s resignation announcement was momentary. During his final weeks in office, Gottlieb has only amped up the FDA’s war on vaping, publishing new regulations for pod-based e-cigarettes and doubling down on the administration’s threat to take the whole category of products off the market.
If teen e-cig use spikes again in 2019 FDA will revisit the continued marketability of pod based e-cigs as a category. Kids mostly abuse cartridge based systems. Against backdrop of rampant teen use closed systems may have no redeeming public health value. https://t.co/PLepQijbT1
— Scott Gottlieb, M.D. (@SGottliebFDA) March 14, 2019
Let’s hope the new FDA chief won’t make good on Gottlieb’s tough talk. The concern about underage vaping is overblown given long-term declining smoking trends. Banning pod-based e-cigarette products as a category altogether could have major unintended consequences, as vaping has been shown to help smokers quit traditional tobacco products.
According to Gottlieb, the determining factor for potential FDA action will be the Center for Disease Control’s 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey, to be released in August. Youth vaping did rise recently according to national surveys. One University of Michigan survey asking middle and high school students if they used e-vapor products over the past 30 days found increases across the board between 2017 and 2018 — from 3.5 percent to 6 percent for eighth graders, 8.2 percent to 16.1 percent for 10th graders, and 11 percent to 20.9 percent for 12th graders.
These numbers are discouraging at first glance, but in the context of long-term tobacco trends, the FDA’s war on vaping is very hypocritical.
For the decade between 1991 and 2001, teen smoking rates of traditional cigarettes hovered near 30 percent for 10th graders according to the same University of Michigan study. Yet there were no calls to ban cigarettes as a category altogether, like there are now for e-vapor products. Indeed, it is arguably a historical accident that traditional tobacco products were not treated with increasing hostility like vaping is today. That is to say, an all-out prohibition on tobacco products is unthinkable since smoking has been around since ancient times. E-vapor, on the other hand, is the new kid on the block, and thus it is susceptible to the regulators’ wrath.
The future FDA chief should not be so zealous to over-regulate as his or her predecessor. Vaping has been shown to help smokers quit, as seen in a recent New England Journal of Medicine study by the U.K.’s National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research. As I wrote in February about the study’s design and findings:
For the sake of sanity, let’s hope the next FDA chief ceases Gottlieb’s misguided attacks on vaping. The Trump administration’s hostile attitude toward a new product is hypocritical in the context of history, especially since vaping has been shown to be a positive alternative to more harmful traditional tobacco products.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.
