AVA President Gregory Conley in U.S. News & World Report urging the Food and Drug Administration to act with common sense when regulating e-cigarettes.
Use Common Sense on E-Cigarettes
Why the FDA should not regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products.
The Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products has two goals that seem to go hand-in-hand: Reduce tobacco use, and reduce the number of smoking-related diseases and deaths. If there was a product that was achieving both goals, why would the FDA take the nonsensical step of classifying it as a tobacco product?
It shouldn’t. Yet, that is exactly what the FDA is proposing to do.
The FDA is pushing a new set of rules that would classify e-cigarettes, which are non-combustible products that use no tobacco, as tobacco products. If approved, the rules would stifle a fast-growing, U.S.-based industry that makes one of the most effective methods of helping people to stop smoking. The rules would also snuff out thousands of independent, family-owned businesses and, in effect, turn over the e-cigarette business to big tobacco companies.
Recent research shows that e-cigarettes – battery-powered devices that heat a liquid nicotine solution and create an inhalable vapor – work exceptionally well to help people kick the smoking habit, better than patches, gum or any other smoking-cessation methods.
