A private organization called on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to intensify efforts to prevent youth smoking and help adult smokers quit.
Quit For Good, a non-profit organization promoting harm reduction in the Philippines, recently lauded the United States' intensified campaign on preventing the youth from consuming nicotine products but reiterated that focus must also be given to millions of adult smokers looking for better alternatives to cigarettes.
"The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) should strike a balance between protecting the youth while giving adult smokers access to far less harmful, smoke-free alternatives to cigarettes such as vapes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches," Dr. Lorenzo Mata Jr., Quit for Good president, said.
Mata issued the statement in response to the speech of CTP Director Dr. Brian A. King at the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum in Seoul, South Korea that despite the US' considerable progress in reducing smoking, about 11.5 percent of American adults continue to use combustible cigarettes.
While the US government spends around $600 billion a year to address the direct healthcare costs and lost productivity because of smoking, he said there must be additional efforts to reduce combustible cigarettes.
Attention is on cigarettes and certain other combustibles due to the known risks related to those products, King said.
The CTP agreed that the tobacco landscape is diversifying, as the US also regulates e-cigarettes as tobacco products. The initial Tobacco Control Act in 2009 gave CTP authority over products containing nicotine.
"Right now, we have the ability to regulate all products containing nicotine regardless of the source, and that is thanks to a new law that Congress passed in 2022. We have been working feverishly over the past year to ensure that we are able to fold in those synthetic nicotine products into our portfolio of regulation," he said.
King also pointed out that the number of children using e-cigarettes in the US has decreased by half since 2019.
"We're now seeing about half the number of kids currently using e-cigarettes as we did at that peak in 2019, which is a good thing. And I hope to continue to see that proceed forward. But on balance, we also have over 2 million kids using these products, and there's still room to go in terms of reducing that use," he said.
Mata said that despite the CTP's acknowledgment that combustible cigarettes are to blame for the preventable diseases in the US, it continues to impose strict regulations on smoke-free alternatives that will significantly reduce the positive impact on health and lower healthcare expenses by the Federal government.
"Science supports tobacco harm reduction, which can save smokers' lives. While the FDA has taken an independent policy from the World Health Organization which continues to demonize these innovative products, it is time for the US to make a significant stride against smoking by promoting, instead of restricting, these products as alternatives to cigarettes. This is what the UK does," Mata said.
He said proper regulation and enforcement, instead of restriction, would address the situation as having a balanced policy "will protect the youth and help adult smokers at the same time."