New York Post Op-Ed: Smoking is up for the first time in decades, thanks partly to the FDA’s regressive war on vaping

By Amanda Wheeler

For the first time in 20 years, smoking rates are on the rise. That mournful finding ought to be reinvigorating the effort to stamp out cigarettes. Astoundingly, the opposite is happening.

A new tax on nicotine vaping, which Democrats have tried to inject into the Build Back Better bill, would drag more than 2.5 million Americans back to cigarettes, according to National Institutes of Health-funded academic research. And just weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration effectively outlawed nearly all vaping products, though they’ve proven to be the single most effective method to quit smoking ever devised.

President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the FDA, Dr. Robert Califf, helped craft that hardline policy in his brief Obama-era stint at the agency. His Tuesday confirmation hearing suggests he’ll easily end up in the post again.

So are public-health advocates up in arms? Nope. They too seem bent on destroying the nascent vaping industry, loudly urging the FDA to issue more “market denial orders” to deprive millions of Americans of the right to switch from smoking to the vastly safer alternative of vaping.

More than 400,000 Americans lose their lives each year to smoking-related illnesses while not a single person has died from vaping nicotine. Yet groups like the American Lung Association and American Medical Association have called for a total ban on vaping products but say nothing about the spike in cigarette smoking — even though vaping taxes and bans are directly correlated with increased smoking rates.

Little wonder that stocks for the leading tobacco companies are all on the rise and analysts are bullish that vaping crackdowns will continue that trend.

If the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalitions of the 20th-century Prohibition era seemed uncanny, today’s partnership between moralizing nanny-staters and the cigarette business is truly sinister.