Tobacco regulation should make it easier to quit smoking, not harder. Cigarettes, the product responsible for the overwhelming majority of tobacco-related disease, remain widely available, while less harmful alternatives such as vaping face flavor bans and one of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) most restrictive approval processes. The result is a system that makes it harder for smokers to quit, compromising public health instead of protecting it.
As of May, the FDA had authorized 45 e-cigarette products, also known as vapes, for sale. When it finally authorized its first non-tobacco and non-menthol flavored vaping products this year, the approval came with extraordinary conditions including random biometric checks. Cigarettes require no comparable surveillance.
Regulating vaping more harshly than smoking makes little sense given what is known about the relative risks of the products. Vaping is not harmless, and people who do not use nicotine should not start. But it is the burning of tobacco, not the nicotine that tobacco contains, that is responsible for much of the catastrophic health damage associated with cigarettes.
The Royal College of Physicians' 2024 review concluded there is clear evidence that vaping is less harmful than combustible tobacco and is a useful smoking cessation tool. It found substantially lower exposure among vapers to carbon monoxide and other toxic chemicals than among smokers. The Royal College recommends that e-cigarettes be offered as a smoking-cessation treatment and specifically says that a range of flavors should remain available to adults using them to quit.
The evidence that vaping helps smokers quit gets stronger each year. A 2025 review examined 104 studies involving more than 30,000 adults. It found high-certainty that nicotine e-cigarettes produce higher smoking-cessation rates than traditional nicotine-replacement products such as patches and gum. Roughly eight to eleven of every 100 smokers using nicotine e-cigarettes successfully quit, compared with about six using an alternative nicotine replacement therapy.
Even with the positive evidence for the impact of vaping on overall smoking trends, restrictions are frequently justified as necessary to stop a supposedly worsening youth nicotine crisis. The most recent federal numbers tell a different story.
According to the FDA's 2025 National Youth Tobacco Survey, current tobacco-product use among middle and high school students fell during 2022 through 2025. In 2025, 7.2 percent of students reported using any tobacco product during the previous 30 days compared to more than 11 percent in 2022. E-cigarette use fell to 5.2 percent from over 9 percent, while cigarette smoking stood at just 1.4 percent. More can be done to prevent minors from buying nicotine products at the point of sale. But falling youth nicotine use undermines the claim that the availability of vaping products for adults is producing an ever-expanding generation of nicotine users.
More importantly, policymakers cannot measure success simply by counting how many people vape. They must ask what those consumers would do instead. That distinction matters because cigarettes and e-cigarettes are substitutes. Making one more expensive or harder to obtain can increase demand for the other.
A 2024 study examined state flavor restrictions using data on nearly 377,000 young adults, finding flavor restrictions were associated with a 2.2-percentage-point increase in daily cigarette smoking. A separate study of San Francisco's flavor ban found the policy was associated with increased conventional cigarette smoking among high school students. These results are the opposite of what the proponents of restrictions intend.
But the FDA and state regulators should consider a different approach. Both should aggressively enforce the existing prohibition on sales to anyone under 21. Retailers that knowingly sell nicotine products to minors should face meaningful penalties. Regulators should establish product-safety standards, require accurate ingredient disclosures, police misleading health claims, prevent advertising directed at children, and remove genuinely unsafe products from the market.
But regulation should be proportional to risk, and to remove dangerous products means acknowledging the ones that reduce smokers’ risks. When the FDA refuses to authorize flavored vapes consumers don’t know which are unauthorized simply because they are flavored and which because they are more dangerous.
The FDA should replace its de facto presumption against vaping products with a predictable approval pathway that asks whether a product is substantially less harmful than smoking and helps smokers quit. The goal of tobacco policy should not be to restrict smokers’ tools to quit. It should be to reduce disease and premature death.
For smokers who can quit nicotine altogether, quitting remains the healthiest option. For those who cannot, moving from combustible cigarettes to a substantially less harmful product is a major improvement. Regulation that ignores that difference and expects every smoker to quit cold turkey does not protect public health. It protects the most dangerous product in the market from its safer competitors.
Justin Leventhal is a senior policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.TheAmericanConsumer.Org or follow us on X @ConsumerPal.
