For all the political posturing around vaping, one fact remains unavoidable: the fastest way to reduce tobacco-related disease is to help smokers switch to far less harmful alternatives. Yet instead of clearing a path for technologies that could prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has created barriers that keep safer products off the market while leaving cigarettes largely untouched. A regulatory framework written for a different era now works against public health, denying smokers the tools that would help them quit.
Vaping is dramatically less harmful than smoking, by some estimates 95 percent less harmful. Hundreds of thousands of smoking-related deaths each year could be prevented if smokers switched to harm-reduction technologies like vaping. Because vaping is also an effective means for smokers to quit, the FDA has failed in its responsibility to protect Americans’ health by so severely limiting adult smokers’ access.
Part of the FDA’s failure is systemic and part is arbitrary. The systemic problem is that the current regulatory framework for approving tobacco products is outdated. The Tobacco Control Act (TCA) requires individual approval for any product not “substantially similar” to one on the market in February 2007. Despite being far safer than cigarettes, vapes—and all modern harm- reduction products—cannot meet the standard because they weren’t on the market in 2007.
Justin Leventhal is a senior policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization that advocates for consumers through evidence-based analysis and data. Follow us on X @ConsumerPal.