US media reported Tuesday that President Joe Biden’s administration will announce a new policy requiring cigarette manufacturers to reduce nicotine to non-addictive levels – a move that would deal a major blow to the tobacco industry.
If successful, the policy could save millions of lives by the end of the century and shape a future in which cigarettes are no longer responsible for addiction and debilitating diseases.
The initiative could be announced as early as Tuesday, the Washington Post said, citing a person familiar with the matter.
It would require the Food and Drug Administration to develop and then publish a rule that could then be challenged by industry, added the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the issue.
The entire effort is expected to take several years and could be delayed or derailed by litigation, or reversed by a future government unsympathetic to its goals.
Nicotine is the “feel good” chemical that attracts millions of tobacco products. Thousands of other chemicals found in tobacco and tobacco smoke are responsible for diseases like cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease, diabetes and more.
Although smoking is less common in the United States than in Europe and has been declining for years, it still accounts for 480,000 deaths in the country each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 13.7 percent of all US adults are current cigarette smokers, according to CDC data.
Reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes has been a topic of discussion by US authorities for years.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced in 2017 that he wanted to move forward on the matter and funded a 2018 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found that “reduced nicotine cigarettes compared to standard nicotine cigarettes the Nicotine exposure and dependence decreased and the number of cigarettes smoked.”
The FDA found that if the policy were passed, eight million premature tobacco-related deaths could be prevented by 2020 by 2100.
The tobacco industry dismisses the results, saying people are actually smoking more.
Biden has made a “cancer moonshot” a core part of his agenda, and the nicotine reduction policy would fit into his goals at minimal cost.
The total economic cost of smoking is more than $300 billion per year, according to the CDC, including more than $225 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and second-hand smoke .
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