Michael Bloomberg enthusiastically endorsed a wave of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations Thursday which could ban 99 percent of e-cigarette products.
“Today’s decision by the FDA to ban the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, as most states have already done, and declare its intention to take up rules banning flavored cigars, are both important and overdue steps that will help protect Americans – especially young people – from harm,” Bloomberg said in a statement.
The FDA’s “deeming” rules are the first major federal intervention into e-cigarette regulation. One of the central points of the almost 500-page rule book is that all e-cigarette products released after Feb. 15, 2007, (predicate date) will have to go through the Pre-Market Tobacco Applications process (PMTA).
PMTA is ruinously expensive and can cost millions of dollars per product. By the FDA’s own admission it will take more than 1,700 hours for an applicant to complete. (RELATED: FDA Announces Rule To Ban 99 Percent Of E-Cigarettes)
According to the FDA’s own analysis, the costs of a PMTA are so high approximately 99 percent of products on the market won’t even be put through the process. But Bloomberg welcomed the FDA rules, claiming they would protect kids from tobacco.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about the health impacts of e-cigarettes, but there’s no question that nicotine is addictive, making them a serious threat to the progress we have made reducing smoking rates,” Bloomberg wrote. “That’s why California has gone further than the FDA in protecting the public and especially young people. We urge the FDA to move swiftly to address the dangers of e-cigarettes in a more comprehensive fashion.”
But there’s a major problem with Bloomberg’s assertion — there’s no credible evidence to suggest e-cigarettes are slowing the fall in the smoking rate. While Vaping has surged among middle and high school students in recent years despite age restrictions, cigarette use has fallen markedly.
“From 2011 through 2015, significant decreases in current cigarette smoking occurred among youth,” says the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (RELATED: How The CDC Turned A Fall In Youth Smoking Into An Attack On E-Cigarettes)
Between 2011-2015, cigarette use among high school students plummeted by more than a third from 15.8 percent to 9.3 percent. According to a report by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), there is no evidence behind the claim that e-cigarettes act as a gateway to smoking tobacco. (RELATED: Game Changer: World Leading Medical Group Backs E-Cigarettes)
“There is no evidence thus far that e-cigarette use has resulted, to any appreciable extent, in the initiation of smoking in either adults or children; the extremely low prevalence of use of e-cigarettes among never-smoking adults and children indicates that, even if such gateway progression does occur, it is likely to be inconsequential in population terms,” says the RCP.
“Although it remains important to monitor the use of e-cigarettes in young people, to ensure the quick identification of evidence of any increase in uptake of smoking arising from e-cigarette use, it appears that, to date, concerns over gateway progression into smoking are unfounded.”
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