The U.S. Food & Drug Administration is considering whether to ban menthol-flavored cigarettes. The agency first proposed a ban in 2022, but it has yet to finalize the proposal, prompting some activist groups to sue. (Query whether these groups have standing.) The FDA and those groups calling for a ban on menthol cigarettes claim that this will benefit public health, but it's not clear the relevant medical research supports this claim, as it is not clear that such a ban will do much to reduce smoking rates or smoking initiation. This is particularly true as some relevant research assumes th ..read more

This week, the Office of the Solicitor General filed a petition for certiorari in FDA v. Wages & White Lion Investments LLC, asking the Supreme Court to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit's en banc decision concluding that the FDA's denial of some vaping product pre-market tobacco applications (PMTAs) was arbitrary and capricious. According to the SG, Supreme Court review of the Fifth Circuit's decision is warranted because the court relied upon "legal theories that have been rejected by other courts of appeals that have reviewed materially similar FDA denial order ..read more

Last month, New Zealand scrapped a law that would have gradually prohibited tobacco products by banning sales to anyone born after 2008. But Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, will implement a similar scheme now that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (SJC) has cleared the way. Brookline's bylaw, which bans sales of "tobacco or e-cigarette products" to anyone born after 1999, is unlikely to have much practical impact, since the town is surrounded by municipalities where such sales remain legal. But it reflects a broader transition from regulation to prohibition among progressives wh ..read more

Most Americans understand that smoking is harmful. It remains a leading cause of preventable death in the United States. A growing number of Americans do not understand that vaping and non-combustible tobacco products are far less risky. In a recent article, Jacob James Rich and I explored why this might be. One source of public misunderstanding could be that doctors are often unaware of the extensive research concluding that vaping, while not risk-free, is substantially less risky than smoking (such that were all smokers to switch to vaping, tens of thousands–if not millions–of premature deat ..read more

Between 2015, when a sleek and innovative nicotine delivery device known as Juul hit the market, and 2019, when that product was falsely implicated in a rash of lung injuries, its manufacturer's reputation and financial potential plummeted. The four-part Netflix documentary Big Vape, based on Time correspondent Jamie Ducharme's 2021 book of the same name, is a surprisingly evenhanded and fair-minded account of how that happened. As even their critics concede, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, the former smokers who founded Juul Labs, were sincerely determined to do well by doing go ..read more

Less than three months after launching an attack on energy drinks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has a new target: Zyn nicotine pouches. In a press release Sunday, Schumer labeled Zyn a "quiet and dangerous" alternative to vaping, claiming that with the decline in smoking, tobacco companies are adapting by focusing on new products like oral nicotine. Zyns are small pouches of nicotine meant to be placed between the lips and gums. Two strengths of the product are available at three and six milligrams of nicotine, and they come in several flavors. Schumer's ire appears to have b ..read more

The first time I saw an IQOS, the innovative tobacco product on which Philip Morris International is betting billions of dollars to replace cigarettes, was at a wedding in 2016. A friend had excitedly pulled me outside to try this new device that had enabled him to finally kick his smoking habit. Not quite a cigarette because it didn't ignite, not quite a vape because it used actual tobacco, supposedly less toxic than conventional cigarettes but satisfying enough to compete with them, it seemed that this heated tobacco might be the future of nicotine. Neither the device nor the specially trea ..read more

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its long-awaited en banc decision in Wages and White Lion Investments, L.L.C. v. Food & Drug Administration, in which it considered a challenge to the FDA's denial of vaping product applications. By a vote of 10-6, the court handed the FDA a substantial loss, and deepened the circuit split over the FDA's handling of vaping product applications. This is the Fifth Circuit's third Wages & White Lion opinion. A panel of the court had initially stayed the FDA's enforcement of its prohibition on the sale unapproved vapin ..read more

After two former Georgia election workers sued Rudy Giuliani for falsely accusing them of committing massive fraud in 2020, his attorney argued that the real culprit in that calumny was The Gateway Pundit. Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit publisher Jim Hoft, who faced a separate defamation lawsuit by the same plaintiffs, was arguing that his website "fairly and accurately reported on the claims made by third parties, such as Trump's legal team," which Giuliani led. This month's $148 million verdict against Giuliani suggests that jurors were not swayed by his attempt to shift the blame for his basele ..read more

On this date in 1933, Americans ratified the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, officially repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that had ushered in Prohibition of alcohol just 14 years prior. Many of us will toast the occasion the same way Americans did in 1933: with a good drink. If you're so inclined, you may also want to light up a smoke while you still can. Ninety years after the end of one era of Prohibition, we are gradually creeping into a new one forbidding the sale of tobacco and/or nicotine. And just as in that previous era, these laws are encouraging illicit markets, forcing ..read more