THE PRO-CANCER COALITION: Democrats and FDA protect Big Tobacco and Big Pharma from competition that would save lives but cut their profits.
Why would public-health officials oppose what may be the most effective tool yet discovered for getting smokers to quit? The campaign against e-cigarettes makes no sense medically, since there’s little to no evidence of harm from these devices and mounting evidence that smokers are using them to quit, as the British Royal College of Surgeons recently concluded. But while the British scientific establishment is encouraging this new industry, the FDA is trying to destroy it with regulations that will outlaw most products and make new ones prohibitively expensive to introduce unless you’ve got the kind of financial resources available to tobacco companies (who market their own e-cigarettes).
You can blame this prohibitionism partly on the American Left’s moral zeal to ban anything it finds offensive (pot okay, nicotine evil). But there’s also money involved, as Monica Showalter of the American Media Institute reports:
Drug companies favoring the FDA rules—usually big backers of Democrats—have huge sums invested in prescription smoking-cessation drugs, covered in many cases under the Democrat-passed Affordable Care Act, which they helped shape. They now face stiff competition from readily available e-cigarettes. Similarly, tobacco companies, left flat-footed by the growth of the upstart vaping market, also support the FDA rules as they look to shore up market positions in both tobacco and e-cigarettes.
Case Western University law professor Jonathan H. Adler calls this alignment a classic “Baptist-bootlegger” alliance where unlikely parties share an aim and combine forces, similar to the way Baptists and bootleggers once worked in tandem to preserve the prohibition status quo in the 1920s. “When such forces are aligned, they have a particularly powerful influence on policy outcomes,” he writes in an upcoming study for the Yale Journal of Regulation called “Baptists, Bootleggers and E-Cigarettes.”
The alliance puts Democrats at odds with vaping hipsters and others in their political base, including smokers just trying to quit. “As someone who, thanks to vaping, was able to quit the deadly habit after decades of smoking myself, this is a very disturbing development,” wrote Brad Friedman on the Daily Kos, the left-leaning website. “It’s made even more disturbing by the particular big-name Democrats … who support the new regulations.”
The divide on the left has been noted by Bill Godshall, founder of Smokefree Pennsylvania, a Democrat who sees vaping, while not risk-free, as a means of helping smokers quit. “The whole politics of this is decidedly left-wing,” he said.
Showalter notes that the current FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, formerly worked with nearly every pharmaceutical giant with a smoking-cessation product on the market. The FDA’s chief tobacco regulator, Mitch Zeller, was a consultant for one of those companies, GlaxoSmithKline. And she points to the large campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies to prominent anti-vaping Democrats, including Frank Lautenberg, Ed Markey, Sherrod Brown and Richard Blumenthal. Meanwhile, Republicans have been fighting the FDA regulations and resisting the junk-science hysteria from the Left:
As the anti-vaping alliance solidified, Republican opponents began to embrace e-cigarettes as a cause. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of California openly vaped an e-cigarette on the House floor in 2015 to show his support.
Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, told the American Media Institute that the vaping issue could help swing the 2016 election. E-cigarettes, he said, are not so much a product as “a movement,” a bellwether of a new consumer-driven economy.