Elections have consequences which cannot come fast enough for the Food and Drug Administration and Center for Tobacco Products.
President Biden’s FDA and CTP bureaucrats have run roughshod over the law, misleading the public on the benefits of vaping and banning flavored e-cigarettes, all while ensuring 30 million Americans continue to suffer from the leading cause of chronic death and disease – smoking cigarettes.
President Trump is determined to reverse this course for the Forgotten 500,000 Americans who die each year from smoking-related diseases. He made this clear when I met with him in September, pledging on Truth Social to repeat his 2019 act of saving flavored vaping.
In 2019, Trump saved the vaping industry by rejecting bureaucrats’ call to ban all flavored vapes and, instead, raised the age to purchase tobacco products to 21. He understood that flavored e-cigarettes help adults quit smoking and that the small businesses selling them must be protected from government overreach. As a result of his decisive action, the youth vaping rate plunged 71% in the past four years to a record low and more than 15,000 small businesses were spared.
Since then, Biden’s FDA has done everything it can to kill the vaping industry, including illegally denying 99.9% of all e-cigarette applications, resulting in 80 lawsuits. The agency’s legal woes are so bad it is now before the Supreme Court, which could easily uphold a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that called the FDA’s actions unlawful for “implementing a de facto ban on flavored e-cigarettes” and leading “manufacturers of flavored e-cigarettes on a wild goose chase.”
To cover up its illegal actions, Biden’s FDA weaponized the Justice Department to target small vape businesses, drag them into court, and shut them down. Even worse, FDA is forcing Customs & Border Protections to prioritize searching for flavored nicotine products, diverting crucial resources from stopping fentanyl, human trafficking, and illegal immigration.
The absurdity is amplified by the fact that Biden’s FDA authorized only a handful of vaping products – all owned by Big Cigarette companies – and no flavored e-cigarettes or pouches, while at the same time, fast-tracking more than 5,000 combustible tobacco products, including 950 new cigarettes. This negligence is stunning: millions have died under Biden’s watch and millions more are suffering from cigarette-related diseases, costing the U.S. government $16 billion in healthcare costs and lost GDP each year.
The Biden FDA’s preference for deadly combustible products clearly serves the interests of the U.S. chronic disease industrial complex – allowing healthcare and pharmaceutical industries to bank billions through drug approvals on the myriad chronic and debilitating heart, lung, and cancer diseases caused by smoking. Biden’s FDA does not serve the interests of the American people who deserve access to a variety of life-saving, less harmful flavored nicotine products.
I agree with America’s leading tobacco-control scientists on the need to “add e-cigarettes to the smoking cessation toolkit.” So did those who voted for President Trump. The Vaping Voter spoke loudly in this election, demanding a reset on FDA’s misguided priorities and access to less harmful flavored vaping and nicotine pouch options.
The incoming Trump Administration understands the need for government agencies to end chronic diseases by dramatically reshaping FDA’s unlawful pre-market tobacco application regulation – a regulation far out of step with the language and purposes of the Tobacco Control Act.
Strong and swift presidential leadership is required to rescind the regulation and replace it with a transparent, science-based product standard, just as the law originally contemplated. Not only will such actions ensure that all products on the market are safe, but these actions will also drive innovation and give consumers access to the most effective tool to quit smoking.
The incoming Congress also believes that failed regulations must be undone, that the regulatory state must be constrained, and that consumers – and not unelected bureaucrats – should have the freedom to choose winners and losers in a free market.
Voters, consumers, businesses, and scientists called for a reset of FDA’s approach to less harmful nicotine products. We are all counting on President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Make America Healthy Again by ending the combustible nightmare Biden’s FDA created, reforming the administrative state, saving the vaping industry, restoring American’s freedom of choose non-combustible nicotine options and, in the process, saving countless American lives.
The clock is ticking.
Tony Abboud is the Executive Director of the Vapor Technology Association (VTA).
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