U.K. policymakers are years ahead of their U.S. colleagues in pursuing a revolution in nicotine delivery, according to American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Sally Satel.
While the Royal College of Physicians in April released a report that advocating vapor products as a harm-reduction strategy, Satel wrote in Forbes, the U.S. FDA is protecting the cigarette market with its final deeming rule on products that were not previously regulated.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Director Sylvia Burwell’s statement about “a new generation of Americans who are at risk of addiction,” and her apparent exclusion of adult smokers who could benefit from vapor products, echoes the “ill-founded rhetoric” of CDC Director Tom Frieden, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and other anti-vaping groups that are “largely fixated on a yet-to-be demonstrated impact on children yet pay little attention to the established benefit to smokers,” Satel said.