Tobacco Facts.

Under the pretext of improving public health, the Senate is currently debating a bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration broad regulatory control over the tobacco industry. Unfortunately, the bill under consideration does little to achieve the goal of increased public health and would end up doing more harm than good.

The bill would severely impede the FDA’s core mission to ensure that food, drugs, medical devices and cosmetics — currently 25 percent of the U.S. marketplace — are safe, effective and properly labeled. Tobacco is an inherently dangerous product, and adding it to the list would stretch the already overburdened agency even more and significantly conflict with its core mission.

In fact, the bill before Congress could shortchange the FDA’s budget by $2 billion, forcing the agency to move staff and resources away from food and drug oversight. It is ridiculous to ask the FDA, which is the federal government’s primary guarantor of safety and efficacy, to regulate a product that is fundamentally and undeniably unsafe.

This bill could also result in more breakdowns in the safety of our food supply and longer approval times for lifesaving drugs and medical devices. Andrew von Eschenbach, the former head of the FDA and also the former director of the National Cancer Institute and a cancer survivor, opposes the bill for this reason.

In terms of reducing death and disease from tobacco use, this bill misses the mark by a long shot. It would keep Marlboros and Camels on the shelves by grandfathering them in while making it virtually impossible to bring reduced-risk products to market. If the goal is to reduce mortality rates, then it makes no sense to keep these higher-risk products in stores at the expense of offering lower-risk alternatives to consumers.

According to the government’s own experts, if we did nothing and allowed current trends to continue, the smoking population would decrease by 6 million over 10 years. We are being asked to create a new, multibillion-dollar bureaucracy that, if successful, will be only one-sixth as successful as doing nothing.

If we want efficient, effective regulation of tobacco, the FDA is not our best option. This is why I have proposed regulation under an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services responsible solely for tobacco.

In the past 10 years, states have spent just 3.2 percent of their total tobacco-generated revenue on smoking prevention and cessation programs. Currently, no state is funding tobacco prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended level, and only nine states are funding tobacco prevention at even half the CDC’s recommended level.

If we want to improve public health, we have to do more to keep kids from smoking. And for those Americans who are struggling to quit, we need to at least offer them safer options. Unfortunately, the bill currently before Congress does neither.

Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the largest tobacco-producing state, has led opposition to the bill that would assign tobacco regulation to the FDA.

© Copyright:  Politico

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