FDA Working to Remove the Stuff in Cigarettes That Feels Good

Smoking cigarettes is extremely deadly; each year, the habit is estimated to kill around 480,000 Americans. But it makes you feel good near-instantly, washing you over with a calming buzz that nothing else quite matches. It also looks cool — at least in the movies.

Soon, though, the “cool” factor may be the only thing going for it. The Food and Drug Administration has proposed slashing the levels of nicotine — the drug that actually makes you feel good — in cigarettes so drastically that they’d no longer be able to get you hooked.

“By reducing the nicotine level of cigarettes and certain other combusted tobacco products to a level low enough to no longer create or sustain addiction, the cycle of exposure to these toxic chemicals can be broken,” Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, said during a press briefing, per NBC News.

Today, cigarettes contain around 11.9 to 14.5 milligrams of nicotine on average, depending on the brand. The FDA’s plan is to reduce that to just 0.7 milligrams. Basically, as is The Atlantic’s take, it’d ban cigarettes in all but name.

The substance on its own may not be responsible for most of smoking’s harmful effects — that comes from burning tobacco — but it’s incredibly addictive. It’s why smoking is so easy to pick up, and so hard to quit.

“It’s the tar and everything around the nicotine that poses the greatest risk to people’s health,” former acting CDC director Richard Besser told NBC. “But nicotine is what hooks you.”

By curbing addiction, the FDA argues in its proposal, you curb deaths. According to the agency’s estimates, capping nicotine levels at 0.7 milligrams per gram of tobacco — the amount that each cigarette contains — would prevent 1.8 million tobacco-related deaths by 2060, and 4.3 million by the end of the century. 

The cap would also apply to other products including cigarette tobacco, roll-your-own tobacco, most cigars, and pipe tobacco, the FDA said.

It would not, however, affect vapes, nicotine pouches — like the increasingly popular Zyns — non-combusted cigarettes, waterpipe tobacco for hookahs and the like, smokeless tobacco products like snus and dip, and “premium cigars.”

There’s no guarantee, though, that the proposal will be passed into law, in its current form or at all. It’ll be down to the incoming Trump administration to make the decision in September. 

Considering that the FDA first announced its intent for the proposal during Trump’s first term in office, the president-elect’s campaign promise to “Make America Healthy Again” (however sincere, as there’s also talk of gutting the FDA) there’s at least an outside chance of it happening.

“If there’s a goal to make America healthy again, I can’t imagine anything more important to get done than this,” said FDA commissioner Robert Califf, per NBC,

We’re sure that in the meantime, though, the tobacco industry will do everything to make these plans go up in smoke.

More on nicotine: Teens Who Vape Show Higher Levels of Uranium and Lead, Scientists Find