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Is It Time to Limit Nicotine Levels in Cigarettes?
Monday, June 21, 2010

The Food and Drug Administration should use the expanded powers given to it by Congress and crackdown on the level of nicotine in cigarettes, argues David Kessler, former head of the FDA during the Clinton administration. Kessler, who tried to regulate the cigarette industry in the 1990s, only to be blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, claims the FDA could “save 200,000 to 300,000 lives a year” if it reduced nicotine quantities to the point where people no longer could become addicted to cigarettes. Although regulators can’t ban cigarettes or nicotine altogether, they can reduce the drug’s quantity in each cigarette from 10 milligrams to less than one.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 400,000 deaths each year are related to tobacco use, including 38,000 attributed to secondhand smoke.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

FDA Should Use Its Power to Lower Nicotine in Cigarettes, Former Chief Says (by Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post)

Comments

R. Davis - 6/22/2010 12:08:20 AM
Screaming common sense sometimes turns out to be a screaming misconception. About twenty years ago, I was smoking Kool Mild cigarettes and I bought a book titled "Switch Down & Quit: What the Cigarette Companies Don't Want You to Know About Smoking", by Dolly D. Gahagan. The book gives a method for stopping smoking that involves switching to a slightly lighter brand of cigarette every three weeks or so. I explain it more fully at http://www.econdataus.com/smoke.html . As the book predicted, I did compensate somewhat when I initially switched to a lighter brand. This was especially true for the most difficult switch from 0.3 milligrams nicotine and 3 milligrams tar to 0.1 milligrams nicotine and 1 milligrams tar. But also as the book predicted, I adjusted to every switch within a week or two and slipped back to my old habits as far as the number of cigarettes that I smoked. I also believe that I slipped back to sucking the smoke to the same depth and for the same length of time. What I do know is that the first time that I tried Carltons (0.1 milligrams nicotine and 1 milligrams tar), it was like sucking on air. When I finally switched down to them and adjusted, however, they did taste like normal cigarettes. Now this method may not work for many people. In fact, when I finally did quit, I had the additional motivation that my company had gone smokeless and I could no longer smoke in the office. However, I did feel as though I had relatively little physical withdrawal when I quit. In fact, it seemed like I had more physical withdrawal when I made the difficult switch described above. I did still have to deal with the strong psychological addiction but I believe that the relatively weak physical addiction made quitting easier. Also, switching down did give me the confidence that I did not NEED a certain level of nicotine and that my body could adapt to a lower level (or, eventually, none at all). An 2007 story on the Journal of the National Cancer Institute titled "Can Reducing Nicotine Help Wean Smokers?" (at http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/10/749 ) suggests that, at the very least, the charge that smokers will fully compensate for drops in nicotine is questionable. It states: If you remove nicotine from tobacco and do it gradually, it may be possible to reduce nicotine dependence, so when adolescents first start smoking, they won't become addicted," he says. But the data appear to point in contradictory directions. Some show that when people smoke lower-nicotine "light" cigarettes, they take bigger, longer puffs. Yet other studies show that sometimes people do not inhale more to compensate when their cigarette has less nicotine. This suggests that we need to depend on careful research and open debate, not screaming common sense.

John R. Polito - 6/21/2010 7:04:07 AM
We need to be extremely careful here. While the one year-old Family Smoking Prevention Act forbids the FDA from "requiring the reduction of nicotine yields of a tobacco product to zero," common sense screams that unless the reduction is as close as possible to zero, that smokers will compensate by smoking more cigarettes harder, sucking the smoke deeper and holding it longer. The FDA needs to get this right or risk creating a health nightmare. Before attempting to retire the combustion cigarette as a nicotine delivery device (the dirtiest drug delivery device ever devised) the FDA needs to:(1) restore integrity to smoking cessation research where sham placebo science continues to pretend that experienced nicotine addicts won't recognize full-blown withdrawal within 24 hours of quitting, (2) insulate youth from "safe" and "safer" nicotine delivery marketing campaigns that could actually increase youth nicotine addiction rates and (3) approve cleaner forms of alternative nicotine delivery such as the c-cigarette. John R. Polito Editor WhyQuit