Lower nicotine requirements in cigarettes could be coming soon
The Food and Drug Administration wants to limit nicotine in cigarettes and other combustible tobacco products, a move the outgoing Biden administration and anti-smoking advocates have said could make smoking a lot less addictive and easier to quit.
The FDA issued the proposed rule Wednesday.
Nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that makes them highly addictive, and Erika Sward, assistant vice president of national advocacy at the American Lung Association, says capping the amount allowed in cigarettes to very low or non-addictive levels could have a huge impact on the popularity of smoking. Sward says there's ample evidence showing such a move would dramatically reduce both smoking, as well as the nearly half million smoking-related deaths in the country every year.
Moreover, she says, it would drastically cut down on youth initiation of smoking: "We can imagine a scenario where kids who are lured by industry marketing, online influencers and flavored tobacco products pick up a cigarette but don't become regular users," she said in a press conference this week.
The idea of limiting nicotine levels in cigarettes originated seven years ago, during the first Trump administration. Donald Trump's second administration would have to finalize the FDA's proposed rule after it undergoes a public comment period.
If it goes into effect, the new rule would upend the tobacco market, says David Spross, executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets. He argues it would simply push cigarette sales underground with smuggling of unregulated products across borders, for example. Spross says in states and localities where menthol and other flavored cigarettes are banned, consumers have been able to buy them across state lines.
"You'd see a huge uptick in the illicit market," he says.
"Smoking rates are at historic lows, and reducing nicotine content in cigarettes will not make these products less risky or improve public health," Luis Pinto, a spokesman for Reynolds American Inc., said in an emailed statement. Pinto says it would harm farmers and retailers financially, while benefiting a new black market for traditional nicotine cigarettes.
Cigarette smoking has been on a steady decline since the late 1990s, but rates remain higher in certain rural communities, and in urban neighborhoods among minorities and people of color.
That includes Cleveland, where the city's public health director Dr. David Margolius says heavy advertising and marketing have kept adult smoking rates at 35% – far above the national average of about 11%.
"As a result we have one of the highest if not the highest rate of deaths from lung cancer in the United States and consequently we have a life expectancy in many of our neighborhoods in the mid-60s," Margolius says.
It's not clear how much support the effort might have under the new Trump administration, but the president's nominee to head Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has talked a lot about the prevalence of preventable chronic illness, including cardiovascular disease.
While dramatic policy change is expected with the new administration, anti-smoking advocates like Dr. Giridhar Mallya, a senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, say limits on nicotine – and curtailing cigarette sales more generally – is consistent with the incoming president's campaign rhetoric.
"Evidence-based policy actions on tobacco control – including banning menthol – would be very much aligned with those notions of wanting to address chronic disease," Mallya says.
Of course, rules to reduce nicotine in cigarettes would have no impact on nicotine in e-cigarettes, which have largely replaced combustible tobacco as one of the main ways young people now consume nicotine.
