The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it will limit nicotine levels in cigarettes to stem addiction and consequent health problems. The formal FDA rule has not been released, yet the implications of this regulatory shift are dizzyingly myriad. Individual liberties, black market diversion, and the odd contrast between food and cigarette labeling and regulation add to the theater-of-the-absurd sideshow this agency has become.
Tackling Cigarettes-Come-Lately
Reducing cigarette addiction is a worthy regulatory goal. Eyebrows are being raised across the nation, however, at this ambitious gambit for its dubious means, not its laudable ends. The FDA has come under fire for Kafka-esque regulatory antics in numerous fields, including its less-than-stellar success in protecting Americans from food toxins. The nicotine regulations smack of a political effort to redeem the disgraced agency for its stream of food-regulating faux pas, some of which have been so embarrassing as to invite adding the FDA to the list of agencies to close under Team Trump.
The cigarette debacle occupies a fascinating historical landscape that holds a mirror to the agency’s current actions regarding both food and drugs. The American cigarette scourge was boosted by free samples distributed by corporations in the Great War, a practice later magnanimously extended to handing out free cartons at High Schools and ubiquitous pro-puffing magazine and television ads in which all-star athletes and physicians touted the health benefits of Pall Malls and mentholated Kools.
In response to the resulting lung cancer epidemic, Congress in 1965 enacted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act to warn the public about health risks and ensure uniform labeling for all states. Six decades later, the FDA now seeks to “cap the nicotine level at 0.7 milligrams per gram of tobacco in cigarettes and certain other combustible tobacco products.” This raises numerous red flags – the rules do not appear to extend to vaping or e-cigarettes, whose products will likely reap a market windfall; black market racketeers (cartels?) are sure to serve the inevitable demand with illicit foreign butts. Then there’s the obvious individual liberty question: What right does the government have to regulate what adults put into their own bodies?
This array of immediate concerns is back-dropped by rather ad hoc and inconsistent messaging by the FDA. This is the agency that approved OxyContin and banned US parents from importing perfectly trustworthy infant formula from the EU when US supplies evaporated. It approved off-the-shelf puberty blockers for pediatric patients while opposing far safer drugs like hydroxychloroquine (which this author took for many years to fight Lyme Disease) to combat COVID-19. The agency has earned its loss of credibility with such inconsistencies, but nowhere more clearly than in food regulations.
Lucky Strikes and Lucky Charms
The advent of the MAHA movement has fueled greater awareness of food additives and agricultural chemicals that threaten Americans’ health, perhaps more even than cigarettes. Lucky Charms were peddled to kids as nutritious, the sugary concoction targeted using giveaway plastic watches and piggy banks – much like cigs were promoted to young consumers to hook them early. Many of today’s food additives literally seed addiction, so the FDA focus on cigarettes after dropping the regulatory ball on OxyContin, Aducanumab (an Alzheimer's drug approved by the FDA that was ineffective but posed serious health threats to patients), and many other pharmaceuticals is a hollow sell.
American children are being fed high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, and a smorgasbord of harmful chemicals, including phthalates, PFAS, carcinogens, and endocrine disruptors, yet the FDA only just banned Red Dye # 3 in 2025. The agency’s sluggish response to crises suggests it may as well be relegated to post-mortem assessments rather than preventive measures – how many have died of cigarette smoking in the century of FDA inactivity?
Recently, the FDA announced in its 2025 dietary guidelines advisory report that it would not regulate ultra-processed foods “...based on evidence graded as limited but might change if a more rigorous definition of ultra-processed foods developed and further studies are concluded.” Parental eyes understandably roll at such always-too-late dithering: “More than 60% of grocery store products contain chemical colorings, sweeteners, or preservatives, according to a recent study.”
Protecting Children, or Big Food?
The agency has a lot of regulatory work to do to prevent childhood illness, making its appeal in support of nicotine regulation unintentionally ironic. FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, M.D. stated: “I hope we can all agree that significantly reducing the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the U.S. is an admirable goal we should all work toward."
Sounds like MAHA – only it is unclear whether restricting nicotine in cigarettes will achieve the stated ends given fears of black market alternatives. Additionally, the move raises other philosophical (constitutional, even) questions. Alcohol is a killer – will FDA limit whiskey to ten proof? Sugary foods are killing Americans and causing dementia, heart disease, and other illnesses – will the agency issue “advisories” to manufacturers, then seek a sin tax or prohibition on consumers while the US government subsidizes both sugar and high fructose corn syrup?
The FDA has OK’d suboxone as a synthetic opioid (provided at taxpayer expense) to replace the OxyContin it approved that lured millions of Americans into irrevocable addiction. So now it will tackle cigarette smoking, “hoping all will agree” it is finally doing its regulatory job?
Punch and Judy FDA
Preventing disease is an admirable goal indeed, but food for children appears to be a third rail untouchable by the FDA. Yet these are regulations FDA can implement without seeding black market backwaters for Tricks Are for Kids or Honey Bunches of Oats. Food toxins and additives designed to stimulate appetite or make the inedible palatable should be low-hanging fruit for the agency, yet the USDA recently pared back its food pyramid (drafted by a panel with apparent conflicts of interest), and the FDA is implementing “healthy” labels for consumers foods – how can it define what is healthy if it cannot define what is ultra-processed?
Perhaps to its credit, FDA has recently announced that eggs are healthy again. It only took the agency about fifty years to clarify that for consumers, a tad faster than its cigarette move. Americans have tired of waiting distrustfully for the dog-and-pony show of regulatory agencies to protect their children.
MAHA is here to stay, and FDA failures must go. The government that once told Americans that margarine was better than butter and that eggs are bad has lost credibility with the public.
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