Research has shown that reducing nicotine levels means people smoke less often. US regulators now want to shift people toward e-cigarettes.US regulators proposed on Friday to reduce the amount of nicotine in cigarettes as part of plan to push people toward e-cigarettes instead.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said e-cigarettes were likely a much healthier alternative to regular smoking. “Nicotine itself is not responsible for the cancer, the lung disease and heart disease that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said. “It’s the other chemical compounds in tobacco and in the smoke created by setting tobacco on fire that directly cause illness and death.”
Percentage of smokers drops, but tobacco deaths rise says study Gottlieb said the agency would work toward making cigarettes minimally addictive or nonaddictive, while granting e-cigarette manufacturers an extra four years in the market without regulation.
The announcement pushed down shares of tobacco companies, but cigarette-maker Altria said it welcomed the move as an “important evolution” in regulation. “We supported FDA regulation because, among other things, it created a framework for communication about reduced-harm products,” the company said in a statement.
Reducing nicotine works Researchers have found that reducing the nicotine content in cigarettes does lead to people smoking less often. University of Pittsburgh researcher Eric Donny said researchers found smokers were less dependent on cigarettes and smoked fewer of them when the nicotine content was reduced by about 90 percent.
Scientists were still researching how often people who smoke lower-nicotine cigarettes switch to e-cigarettes or other, less harmful tobacco products, said Donny, who directs Pitt’s Center for the Evaluation of Nicotine in Cigarettes.
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