If the amount of nicotine in a cigarette is reduced, then smokers will have to smoke more cigarettes in order to satisfy their craving for nicotine. Smoking more cigarettes means a higher risk of cancer. But that’s what an FDA proposal could lead to.
“F.D.A. Tries Last-Ditch Move to Slash Nicotine Levels in Cigarettes,” reports the New York Times. “The agency is asking the White House, in the final days of the Biden era, to move ahead with plans to drastically reduce the addictive substance in traditional tobacco cigarettes”:
The F.D.A. submitted the proposal to the Office of Management and Budget only on Tuesday, a sign that the move was perhaps more wishful and symbolic than realistic for a White House juggling many late-term agenda items. And traditionally, the budget office’s review of agency proposals can take months.
“I think it’s a milestone in progress toward the single most game-changing tobacco regulatory policy….that F.D.A. could ever do,” said Mitch Zeller, a former director of the agency’s tobacco center. “Having said that, it’s only a proposed rule, and we’re obviously in the waning days and weeks of an outgoing administration.”
Even if the F.D.A. receives clearance from the White House to advance the proposal, whether it can survive once President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January is unclear given the sustained opposition from the industry. The tobacco lobby was also a significant donor to Mr. Trump’s campaign; the cigarette maker Reynolds American had given $8.5 million to his main super PAC by late October.
Mr. Trump is known to personally oppose cigarette smoking, but has not weighed in recently on agency issues like nicotine levels in cigarettes. He has chosen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his likely nominee to run the nation’s top health agency, and Mr. Kennedy has railed against federal subsidies given to tobacco growers, saying they eclipse those sent to other farmers who grow fruits and vegetables. He listed the problem as evidence that “we are just poisoning” people and contributing to chronic disease.
Reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes won’t protect smokers’ health. As Reason Magazine notes,
Nicotine itself isn’t what makes cigarettes so dangerous. (Some scientists “wonder if a daily dose could be as benign as the caffeine many of us get from a morning coffee,” notes Scientific American.) It’s the other ingredients in cigarettes, and the byproducts of combustion, that make smoking cigarettes so bad for you….In a world with lower-nicotine cigarettes, people already addicted to nicotine will still be addicted—they’ll just have to smoke more cigarettes to get their nicotine fix. That means that mandating all U.S. cigarettes be low-nicotine cigarettes could actually make smoking riskier by requiring smokers to smoke more and consume more of the other substances in cigarettes in order to get the same level of nicotine they’re used to.
“Study finds nicotine safe, helps in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s,” reported the Tampa Bay Times:
Smoking … contributes to an array of health problems, but nicotine — the calming chemical that cigarettes deliver — might actually be good for the aging brain. Smokers, for example, are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease — a phenomenon that has long puzzled scientists because smoking contributes to cardiovascular disease, which strongly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s. But closer investigation revealed that smoking doesn’t confer the protection; nicotine does.
A study of Alzheimer’s patients showed that those who wore nicotine patches were better able to remember and pay attention than those who didn’t. Another study showed that nicotine boosted cognitive function in older people who didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but were showing signs of age-related mental decline.
Nicotine also seems to protect against Parkinson’s disease, in which the death of cells in a small area of the brain results in tremors, impairing movement and as well as cognitive difficulties.
So what’s going on? How does the dreaded addictive component of cigarettes produce health benefits?
For starters, nicotine by itself isn’t very addictive at all, according to Dr. Paul Newhouse, the director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Cognitive Medicine. Nicotine seems to require assistance from other substances found in tobacco to get people hooked….What makes nicotine especially attractive as a treatment is the fact it causes virtually no side effects, according to Newhouse. “It seems very safe even in nonsmokers,” he said. “In our studies we find it actually reduces blood pressure chronically. And there were no addiction or withdrawal problems, and nobody started smoking cigarettes. The risk of addiction to nicotine alone is virtually nil.”
Filtermagazine discusses the possibility that the FDA lowering nicotine levels in cigarettes could backfire by making smokers think that cigarettes are harmless if they contain less nicotine — even though they aren’t. It says the FDA’s “scaremongering has managed to convince many people that nicotine is the most harmful ingredient of a combustible cigarette, when nicotine does not cause significant harms.” As a result, “many smokers may understand the new products to be a government-approved green light to carry on smoking tobacco. This misguided understanding is liable to have deadly consequences.”
