United States: Towards a reduction in nicotine content in tobacco products?

The US administration is expected to release a proposal for a plan to reduce nicotine levels in tobacco products in the final days of Joe Biden's term. This measure, which had been considered during Donald Trump's first presidency, could however be abandoned by him, given his anti-regulatory position and his proximity to the tobacco industry lobby.[1].

Historic public health measure for Biden's final days in the White House

In the coming days, the outgoing administration of Joe Biden is expected to propose a plan to reduce the nicotine content of tobacco products. Such a proposal is expected to be widely supported by public health organizations, while the ban on menthol, which was supposed to be one of the flagship measures of the Biden mandate, never saw the light of day, due to strong lobbying by the tobacco industry, and a Democratic Party anxious not to appear discriminatory against African-American communities, particularly consumers of menthol cigarettes. However, with Donald Trump being inaugurated on January 20, the future of the proposal to reduce nicotine levels in tobacco products will essentially be in the hands of the future president of the United States.

The future of the proposal is very uncertain

In this regard, it is difficult to predict what the Trump administration intends to do with this project. Indeed, in the summer of 2017, Trump's first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, had also announced that he was considering a plan to reduce nicotine levels in tobacco products. In his announcement, Gottlieb had argued that such a measure would put the United States "on the path to one of the greatest public health victories in modern history," allowing "the saving of millions of lives." More specifically, an FDA estimate published the year after this announcement considered that the implementation of a reduction in nicotine content would lead to a reduction of 13 million smokers in the United States within five years of its implementation. However, Scott Gottlieb left the FDA in 2019, and the project was buried, in part due to a lack of support from the White House, as Mitch Zeller, then director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, said: "We were told that the administration no longer supported [the measure]. Literally, I had to stop talking about it publicly in my speeches and presentations."

A dangerous measure for the tobacco industry

The vigorously anti-regulatory position that Donald Trump claims to want to give to his second term could compromise the success of this proposal. Moreover, many signals suggest that the arrival of the next president of the United States in the Oval Office could result in a lull for public health, whether it is the appointment of a conspirator to the Ministry of Health, or the strong proximity Donald Trump's deal with the tobacco industry lobby. Because of the measure's effectiveness in combating smoking, manufacturers have expressed their opposition to implementing a reduction in the nicotine content of their products. However, if this measure were to be supported by Donald Trump, it could "sound the death knell for smoking in America," according to Dennis Henigan, vice president of legal and regulatory affairs for the NGO Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. Although the tobacco industry has expressed doubts about the ability of this measure to reduce smoking, the stock market performance of manufacturers nevertheless seems to indicate that the reduction in nicotine content could considerably weaken the economic health of the sector. Indeed, following Scott Gottlieb's announcement in July 2017, the stock of Altria, manufacturer of the Marlboro brand in the United States, had fallen by more than 10%[2].

FT