Once again, here comes the Nanny State.
In their latest attack on personal freedom and individual liberty, progressive New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is hard at work pitting working-class Americans against the elite establishment with his attack on Zyn.
Zyn is a popular tobacco-free nicotine product that’s widely used by the type of blue-collar men and women I was proud to represent for years in Congress. Zyn is dangerous, Schumer claims, because he believes it’s being aggressively marketed to kids via social media. To be clear, the legal age to use any tobacco and nicotine products, including Zyn, is 21. And Zyn’s only social media platform is Facebook, which these days is a hotspot for Boomers, not the under-21 crowd. In Schumer’s mind, it is more government intervention that we need – even though it isn’t justified and won’t solve anything.
This mindset and playbook aren’t unique to Sen. Schumer, or even Zyn. Many “more government” types – particularly the regulatory class – are constantly on a mission to propose more policies that ban, limit, curb, or eliminate activities which offend their cultural norms or sensibilities, with little to no regard for the needs of regular, everyday Americans that they very likely look down upon. Alternative nicotine products are frankly benign, not only when compared to cigarettes, but when compared to Schedule 1 cannabis products that Sen. Schumer and his cohort embrace and promote (ironically available in all sorts of flavors and candy).
Enough is enough. And it’s past time to say this very clearly – the “more government” progressive elitists are actually harming public health through their policy edicts.
The progressive approach to harm reduction includes government programs for taxpayer-subsidized fentanyl test kits and ad campaigns about how to use fentanyl “safely,” and needle exchange programs, but somehow Americans’ ongoing addiction to cigarettes doesn’t make the “approved” list of problems in need of less-harmful alternatives.
Addicted to heroin? We have a government program for you to continue to use heroin more safely. Addicted to nicotine? We will make lower risk products – like flavored e-cigarettes – difficult if not impossible to purchase, and we will propagate false market data to scare off those addicted so that they don’t use such products. This is our current bizarre reality.
The Zyn ban playbook is the same tactic, incidentally, which scares cigarette smokers from switching to e-cigarettes. The science is settled: e-cigarettes are the most effective tool on the market to help adults quit smoking, and are far less harmful than cigarettes, which kill 480,000 Americans annually and which are the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States.
Public health officials often cite youth use to allow government agencies and regulators to crack down on lower-risk products largely popular with American consumers. This scares off potential legal adult users who could significantly benefit from switching to a lower-risk nicotine product. The positive and promising news is that youth tobacco usage continues on a downward trend. But you may not know this because it is de-emphasized, as it doesn’t fit the “more government” elitist narrative.
Flavored products like Zyn and vapes provide American smokers with an attractive, less harmful alternative to combustible cigarettes. Study after study proves this – yet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and FDA Center for Tobacco Products Director Brian King, together with some congressional Democrats and the public health establishment, consistently deny this evidence and falsely assert a proliferation of youth use as the driving factor.
News flash: the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey data which was released late last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show youth use of vapes and other non-tobacco nicotine products to in fact be at a 11-year low (this includes flavored e-cigarettes).
If we are told to “believe in science” or that FDA is “following the science” than we simply cannot deny science when it comes to accepting alternatives for American smokers because it doesn’t fit elitist or political narratives.
Bottom line – if you truly care about Americans and their public health, then you cannot allow American smokers – who are disproportionately working class, black, and LGBTQ+ – to be denied access to healthier alternatives to cigarettes. The science and data make clear how to implement smart tobacco harm reduction policy.
America has some of the best scientists in the world who proclaim the benefits e-cigarettes, but some politicians and bureaucrats like – again, like CTP Director Brian King – are refusing to admit what the data clearly shows.
Whether Americans want to choose flavored Zyn pouches or flavored e-cigarettes as their option to quit smoking, the Nanny State wants what it wants – more government, more control, less choice – even if it means a worse public health outcome.
Tobacco harm-reduction in the form of nicotine – whether liquid or pouched – works. How many lives must be prematurely lost before we stop and consider tobacco-free nicotine products as viable alternatives?
Sen. Schumer and FDA leadership have an opportunity to fix this. For the health of 30 million Americans who smoke cigarettes, I sincerely hope they do.
Ryan Costello is a former member of Congress and currently is a registered lobbyist for the Vapor Technology Association.
