Dr. Sally Satel is a well-respected psychiatrist and health writer, as well as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She has been a major player in helping to promote the cause of harm reduction supplying smokers with nicotine in a less-harmful carrier than deadly, toxic cigarette smoke among the public and the media. Over ten years ago, she debated the benefits vs. the exaggerated risks of alcohol in moderation for problem drinkers at an ACSH-sponsored media event; the other topic was tobacco harm reduction. She has remained an ACSH friend.
In Sunday s Times, she published an op-ed entitled Will the FDA Kill Off E-cigs? For those Dispatch readers who have been following the tortured trials of e-cigs/harm reduction, her essay covers well-worn territory; but the fact of its appearance in the high-profile section will undoubtedly help to educate many who remain ignorant of or uninterested in this subject. Of course, objectively, all Americans should be interested, because cigarette smoking remains the number one public health problem in our country, and most of the world. Solutions to helping smokers quit are, therefore, of vital importance.
She summarizes the horrendously counterproductive effect the FDA s deeming regulations (under which the FDA decided to regulate e-cigs as though they were tobacco products), promulgated in April of 2014, would have if they are finally approved at the highest levels. It may take quite a while longer, but their effect would be to reduce the current, innovative, multi-centric e-cig/vapor industry to bankruptcy and eventually leave only the Big Tobacco companies selling their inferior products (still much preferable to their lethal cigarettes). We here at ACSH hope that somehow, wiser heads will prevail and the regulations will be modified to permit easier access to the market for newer, better reduced-harm nicotine delivery products, despite the withering propaganda crusade against this orchestrated by the CDC, the FDA itself, and Big Pharma as well as local governments dependent upon cigarette tax money.
An example of the latter was released last week by the California Dept. of Public Health (funded by the CDC, of course), in the form of an informational leaflet titled Protect Your Family From E-cigarettes. Yes that s the correct title as if e-cigs were marauding gangs of Manson-like killers, or some plague requiring masks and vaccines! I wrote an op-ed in The Daily Caller alternately ridiculing and bemoaning this tragic state of public health that holds sway in our country today.