Could nicotine regulation be the silver bullet that advocates of banning cigarettes have been searching for?
First, some stats about cigarettes:
2. There are still 46 million American adult smokers, and smoking kills about 443,000 Americans each year. Worldwide, the number of cigarettes sold – six trillion a year, enough to reach the sun and back – is at an all-time high.
3. Six million people die each year from smoking – more than from AIDS, malaria, and traffic accidents combined.
4. Of the 1.3 billion Chinese, more than one in ten will die from smoking.
Recently, the FDA announced that it would spend about $600 million over the next five years to educate the public about the dangers of tobacco use. Most would agree that this is a necessary step to reduce the number of the people who smoke cigarettes and ultimately die from them. However, Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford University, believes that educating the public isn’t enough.
“Tobacco control policy,” Proctor says, “too often centers on educating the public, when it should be focused on fixing or eliminating the product.” In other words, Proctor believes that cigarettes should be banned! Though this seems extreme to most, he argues that we don’t just educate parents to keep toys painted with lead-based paints away from their children’s mouths; we ban the use of lead-based paint. Similarly, when thalidomide was found to cause major birth defects, we did not just educate women to avoid using the drug when pregnant.
Rather than completely banning cigarettes, Proctor believes that the FDE could regulate the contents of cigarettes. Here is his main proposal:
Because cigarettes are designed to create and maintain addiction, the FDA should limit the amount of nicotine that they contain to a level at which they would cease to be addictive. Smokers who want to quit would then find it easier to do so.
What are the chances of this happening? They’re probably not great. Tobacco lobbies are still very strong and public opinion on banning cigarettes isn’t overwhelmingly high. However, public support of reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes could be significant. Personally, I had never considered this opinion, but it would prove effective. There are numerous cigarette smokers who wouldn’t still be smoking if they had been able to quit. Perhaps when Proctor’s newest book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, comes out in January there will be more momentum for nicotine regulation.
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The Takeaway: Regulating the amount of nicotine in cigarettes is a sensible step in weaning Americans off of the deadliest drug in their history.
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