The Trump administration should no longer defend FDA’s indefensible vaping ban.

Will the Deeming Rule kill the vaping industry? Dr. Brad Rodu talks from the Heartland about the future of the industry and what the FDA has in store.

The Sacramento Bee on January 21 published a column written by a hearing aids company executive.  Titled “E-cigarettes may also cause hearing loss” (here), the piece asserted that “damage to…

Eradication of all tobacco products could only be justified if all such products posed substantial risk to public health. They do not.

Governments everywhere decades ago launched the War on Tobacco. Which they tell us is to protect us from ourselves. What it really is about – is more government control, and more government tax money.

The FDA, which now regulates cigars, has taken the position that “cigar smoking carries many of the same health risks as cigarette smoking.”

Legislators have long attempted to reduce the negative health impacts of smoking through taxes, bans, and regulations. Some have tried to extend these same policies to electronic cigarettes or “e-cigarettes,” even though they contain no tobacco and are substantially less harmful than traditional cigarettes. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled new regulations placing electronic cigarettes under an avalanche of new rules requiring that they be approved as a new type of tobacco product — effectively treating them like traditional cigarettes.

The FDA wasn’t wrong to regulate e-cigarettes. It was wrong to effectively ban, by its own estimate, up to 98.5% of the e-cigarettes on the market today.

Last November, I discussed a Yale research finding that smoking increased significantly among teens aged 12-17 in states that banned e-cigarette sales to minors compared with states with no bans (here). Now this from researchers at Cornell University: “We document a concerning trend of cigarette smoking among adolescents increasing when [e-cigarettes] become more difficult to purchase.”

In an editorial calling for regulations which would put obstacles in front of adults who seek to quit smoking by switching to e-cigarettes, The Sun’s editorial board relies on a powerfully debunked innuendo and preposterous logic (“Teens and e-cigarettes,” Aug. 23).

The association of tobacco use and body weight has long been a matter of concern. In 2004, I collaborated with Swedish investigators to publish the first research on whether switching from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco blunts some of the weight gain normally seen with quitting via abstinence (abstract here, blog post here).

In this episode of The Heartland Daily Podcast, research fellow Jesse Hathaway is joined by Dr. Brad Rodu, Endowed Chair in Tobacco Harm Reduction Research at the University of Louisville’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center. Hathaway and Rodu talk about how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) corrupt the scientific process in academia, by refusing to fund studies which do not conform to the federal government’s stated vision of a “tobacco-free world.”

The Monitoring the Future survey shows that past 30-day cigarette use among 12th graders dropped from 16.3% in 2013, to 13.6% in 2014, the largest single-year decline in the survey’s 39-year history (datahere).