There are many reasons to have disdain for the Food and Drug Administration (pandemic failures, baby formula shortage, delayed drug approval, human cruelty, etc) and this video gives you another.
If you don’t want have time to watch the video, all you really need to know is that there is a lot of scientific evidence showing that vaping is far safer than smoking.
And “far safer” is an understatement.
So if the goal is reducing risk and helping people live longer, giving smokers the option of switching to e-cigarettes and other vaping products should be a no-brainer.
But an absence of brains seems to be a major qualification for some bureaucrats. The FDA is actually trying to criminalize vaping.
I’m not joking. In a column for Reason, Veronique de Rugy bluntly explains the horrific consequences.
There’s something terrifying about a government so powerful that it can shut down your business overnight without even bothering to offer substantive arguments. Yet that’s what U.S. Food and Drug Administration bureaucrats just did to the e-cigarette company Juul. …Most of the…victims will be cigarette smokers. …the FDA has ordered all Juul e-cigarette products off the market even though its own decision features this remarkable admission: “…the FDA has not received clinical information to suggest an immediate hazard associated with the use of the JUUL device or JUULpods.” In other words, neither Juul’s effectiveness in turning smokers away from more dangerous products nor its success at getting some smokers to quit altogether is, for the FDA, sufficient evidence of the product’s benefit to public health. …the FDA all but guarantees that smokers will smoke more cigarettes, turn to less-established products or even go to the black market to get their nicotine fixes. …The FDA’s war…will…likely claim hundreds of thousands of adults who continue to inhale tar from cigarettes thanks to the agency’s refusal to allow safer, but also appealing, alternatives.
There is a sliver of good news. A court has temporarily blocked the FDA’s deadly decision.
But it is unclear whether that will lead to a permanent victory for better policy.
So what’s the bottom line?
Proponents of a ban fixate on the risk that vaping can be a gateway to nicotine use. And maybe even a gateway for smoking. And they are especially concerned about teenagers getting hooked.
These are legitimate concerns. But cost-benefit analysis shows that those risks are outweighed by the risks of people consuming cigarettes when vaping is not an option.
Many years ago, I wrote at article for the Journal of Regulation and Social Cost to explain how many government policies are indirectly deadly. With its war against vaping, the government is being more direct.
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Image credit: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration | U.S. Government Works.
