Our election this fall will determine many things—possibly down to even whether people trying to quit smoking will be banned by the government from accessing flavored vaping products. With all the big picture issues like immigration, inflation and foreign wars eclipsing almost every other issue before voters, a smaller one like vaping ties into critical individual liberty questions that tend to carry a lot of weight in states that carry a lot of electoral weight like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In an election that likely will resemble the last two in terms of tightness, the Democratic Party’s recent push through the FDA to restrict individual liberty through things like flavored e-cigarette bans will hopefully poll just badly enough to make their candidates think twice about it.
The battle to prevent young people from starting to smoke and for those hooked to have the means to quit safely has been going on for decades now. One of the most successful modern alternatives available is vaping, which offers a variety of flavored products that many have embraced as a smoking alternative and / or as a means to quit. While not a perfect solution (vaping still contains nicotine), it is still far less dangerous than cigarettes which contain a very deadly mix of 7,000 different chemicals that smokers inhale.
The first commercially successful electronic cigarette was launched in China in 2003. The inventor, a pharmacist, was inspired to create a way to vape after his father, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer. The goal was to get people to stop lighting up actual cigarettes. It worked.
So, naturally, Democrats like Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), in their zeal to flex the regulatory power of Federal agencies to dictate how we live, have set the Food and Drug Administration on a mission to harass the industry, including a push to ban vapes that contain flavoring.
The FDA was established during the Theodore Roosevelt administration to ensure that food was safe and drugs were effective. Essentially to keep people from selling snake oil. But today, readers might be appalled at a look inside the FDA. As is the case with most federal agencies, then came the mission creep, such as cracking down on products that do what they are supposed to do but perhaps some politicians or competitors don’t like. The Biden FDA’s war on vaping is a perfect example of this.
“A trial of nearly 1,000 smokers waiting in ERs at 6 U.K. hospitals found a 76% increase in quitting among those given vapes,” Forbes reports. That sort of approach is helping move the numbers on smoking in the right direction: way down.
“Gallup’s latest update on cigarette smoking finds 12% of U.S. adults saying they smoked cigarettes in the past week, similar to the 11% measured a year ago but significantly lower than any other year in Gallup’s nearly 80-year trend,” the pollster reported last year. Vaping is playing a role there, helping people get nicotine without inhaling tobacco smoke.
Ironically, though, the FDA is authorizing the sale of far more combustible tobacco products than vaping products. A search of the agency’s Tobacco Products database finds that: “since 2009, the FDA instead has used its power to authorize the sale of more than 16,800 tobacco products,” but only a couple of dozen were vapes. The rest involved burning or chewing tobacco in various ways.
Meanwhile, Democrat party leaders are sending the wrong message. They want the FDA to target vaping. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for one, wants the FDA to use its “full authority and power to investigate and take actions” against particular vaping products. His office claims “there are clear workarounds and illegal methods being used by sneaky actors” to sell vapes.
How sneaky are the methods? The New York Post says that Schumer cited one e-cigarette that “is wrapped in colorful packaging.” That’ll sneak it under the radar! Schumer and his fellow Democrats are ignoring the reality: flavored vaping can help people quit smoking and can thereby save hundreds of thousands of lives. Not to mention curb the astonishing medical costs associated with the variety of smoking related diseases.
Unfortunately, too many people are absorbing the wrong message about vaping. The BBC reports that 57% of British smokers now think vaping is just as dangerous as smoking. In reality: “Vaping exposes users to far fewer toxins and at lower levels than smoking cigarettes,” it explains. “Cigarettes release thousands of different chemicals when they burn. Many are poisonous and up to 70 cause cancer. They also cause other serious illnesses, including lung disease, heart disease and stroke.”
This is a powerful moment in American healthcare history. Technology is helping us to save lives and cut costs at an extraordinary clip. The Biden FDA should focus on its job of making sure food and medicines are safe, period. It shouldn’t be in the nanny business—like shutting down products that work and are helping Americans quit smoking. That is an assault on individual liberty that could blow back hard on Kamala Harris and other Democrats in November.