The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to protect the public’s health and safety. So why is it trying to block the sale of an electronic alternative to cigarettes that can save people’s lives by simulating smoking without burning tobacco?

Electronic cigarettes, also known as e-cigarettes, are battery-powered devices that deliver nicotine in a vapor composed mainly of the food additive propylene glycol. There’s no question that inhaling this vapor is much safer than sucking combustion products into your lungs. Joel Nitzkin, who chairs the American Association of Public Health Physicians’ Tobacco Task Force, says that, in terms of health hazards, e-cigarettes “should be seen as generic equivalents of the pharmaceutical nicotine products” such as nicotine gum, patches and inhalers, posing “a risk of illness and death less than 1 percent of the risk posed by cigarettes.”

A customer tries an electronic cigarette.

The FDA is nevertheless trying to ban e-cigarettes, arguing that they are “an unapproved drug-device combination” under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. Last month U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, responding to a lawsuit filed by two e-cigarette distributors, NJOY and Smoking Everywhere, issued a preliminary injunction barring the FDA from seizing their products. Last week the FDA filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking it to reverse Leon’s decision.

In his ruling, Leon noted that the FDA was using the same argument to ban e-cigarettes that it unsuccessfully used back in the 1990s to assert authority over conventional cigarettes — a gambit that was shot down by the Supreme Court. In its “tenacious drive to maximize its regulatory power,” Leon said, the FDA is clinging to an “unreasonable and unacceptable” interpretation of the law.

Leon also was skeptical of the FDA’s argument that e-cigarettes pose an intolerable threat to public health. “Both Smoking Everywhere and NJOY have already sold hundreds of thousands of electronic cigarettes,” he wrote, “yet FDA cites no evidence that those electronic cigarettes have endangered anyone. Nor has FDA cited any evidence that electronic cigarettes are any more an immediate threat to public health and safety than traditional cigarettes, which are readily available to the public.”

The FDA tries to obscure the huge safety advantage of e-cigarettes by citing tests that found traces of tobacco-specific nitrosamines, a kind of carcinogen, in some e-cigarette cartridges. But tiny amounts of nitrosamines also can be found in FDA-approved nicotine replacement products, and there’s no evidence they pose a measurable hazard.

Incredibly, the FDA won’t even admit that smokers can reduce their health risks by switching to e-cigarettes. “We don’t know if this is any better for them,” an FDA spokeswoman told a St. Louis newspaper. Another spokeswoman went even further in an interview with NPR, worrying that “some people may mistakenly perceive these products to be safer alternatives to conventional tobacco use.” If the FDA really thinks inhaling propylene glycol vapor containing nicotine is just as dangerous as inhaling smoke containing myriad toxins and carcinogens, how can we trust it to make scientific judgments about the safety of anything it regulates?

A ban on e-cigarettes could have lethal consequences if it means that people who would have used them continue to smoke instead. The FDA is charged with protecting consumers from misleading claims and dangerous products. But in this case, it’s the FDA that is misleading consumers and endangering their lives.

source: aolnews.com

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