The United States government announced Tuesday that it will develop a new policy that requires cigarette manufacturers to reduce nicotine to non-addictive levels.a measure that will deal a serious blow to the tobacco industry.
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The measure requires the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop and publish regulationswhich could then be challenged by the tobacco industry.
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“Nicotine is powerfully addictive,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement. “Making cigarettes and other combustion tobacco products minimally addictive or non-addictive would help save lives.”
Implementation of the initiative would take several years and could be delayed or derailed by litigation, or reversed if a future government decides not to go ahead because it is unsympathetic to its goals.
Nicotine is the substance that leads millions of people to consume cigarettes.
Thousands of other chemicals contained in tobacco and its smoke are responsible for diseases such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung disease and diabetes among others.
“The addiction to nicotine in combustion products is the main driver of continued consumption of these products”the FDA added in its statement.
The announcement was welcomed by tobacco control groups.
“The American Lung Association is pleased … This is an important step forward for public health, and we urge the FDA to expand this proposal to include all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes,” said the director. General of the group, Harold Wimmer.
Although the number of smokers has been declining over the years, tobacco is responsible for 480,000 deaths a year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Some 13.7% of American adults are current smokers, according to data from the CDC.
In 2017, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that he wanted to move the issue forward, funding a study published in 2018 in the New England Journal of Medicine that found “reduced nicotine cigarettes … reduced the exposure and dependence” and “the number of cigarettes smoked”.
The tobacco industry rejects those findings, saying that, in fact, people would smoke more.
President Joe Biden has made fighting cancer a centerpiece of his agenda, and nicotine reduction policy would fit within his goals, at minimal cost.
The economic cost of smoking amounts to more than $300 billion a year, according to the CDC, including more than $225 billion in direct health care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and smoke exposure.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from AFP
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