Writing at reason.com, Jacob Sullum poses a pointed question. Why should adult US smokers pay, potentially with their lives, for the carelessness of convenience store clerks?
He said that the moral logic of the trade-off demanded by the US Food and Drug Administration escaped him.
Sullum, who is a senior editor at Reason magazine, was commenting on the FDA’s proposed efforts to address what it sees as a vaping ‘epidemic’ among young people – efforts that include limiting the flavor options of vaping products sold in most stores to those claimed to be least likely to appeal to the young. Stores that fail to check properly the ages of people buying such products are seen by the FDA as a major supplier to young people.
Critics of the vaping industry, Sullum said, portrayed the flavors that the FDA wanted to ban from stores that admit minors as evidence of a conspiracy to hook the youth of the US on nicotine. The FDA had a more sophisticated understanding of the market but was still far too willing to sacrifice the interests of adult smokers in the name of fighting an ‘epidemic’ of underage e-cigarette use.
Sullum quotes the FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb as saying or implying on several occasions that switching adult smokers to vaping could have an unprecedented, positive health impact.
And he says it follows that making e-cigarettes less appealing and less accessible has a public health cost, measured in smoking-related diseases and deaths that otherwise would not have occurred.
A reasonable question
