 One could say that we always need some element of a drug war. There's this need for a new demon drug. Every society needs a boogeyman. One vital factor in Jim's death was this. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances out there. A major factor in the dramatic decline in U.S. smoking rates is the advent of alternative delivery mechanisms for nicotine, especially e-cigarettes. Vaping isn't completely risk-free but is far less harmful than smoking tobacco. According to the British Royal College of Physicians, laboratory tests of e-cigarette ingredients in vitro toxicological tests and short-term human studies suggest that e-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. But instead of welcoming this wildly successful smoking cessation technology, state and federal regulators are making e-cigarettes harder to access. So do you think we're entering a new era of prohibition for tobacco products? We are definitely on that path. There's been a ton of moral panic around electronic cigarettes, partially driven by adults, but mostly driven by the fact that a lot of teams were taking it up. Journalist Jacob Greer is the author of The Rediscovery of Tobacco, which argues that the war on smoking has become counterproductive. His article Welcome to the Nicotine Prohibition Era appeared in a recent issue of Reason Magazine. Tobacco is arguably one of the most destructive drugs in the world. It kills more than 400,000 Americans every year. So there's a very understandable desire to encourage people to smoke less. Now vaping, it's helping smokers quit. On the initiation level, more people are taking up vaping instead of smoking. So the latest numbers among youth are that while yes, vaping is obviously higher than it was several years ago, smoking is all disappearing. The Surgeon General calls it an epidemic. The use of e-cigarettes among middle and high school students has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. The data is pretty clear so far in the limited studies we have that it looks like it is a gateway for youth smoking. The research actually shows that the long-term decline in smoking prevalence among U.S. youth accelerated after 2013 when vaping became more widespread. That's according to a 2018 paper in Tobacco Control, which shows an especially pronounced decline among kids in 10th and 12th grades. Teen vaping did rise dramatically from 2017 to 2019, but has been declining ever since. Because in taking the drugs, the person is doing exactly the opposite of what he's trying to do as a teenager. He is putting himself into a position where he cannot make decisions, where he is only irresponsible and incapable of doing this, and he is cutting his life off. I think the other thing we have to keep in mind is that for so many years the war on drugs was justified as one great big Child Protection Act. Described by Rolling Stone as the point man for drug policy reform efforts, Ethan Nadelman is the founder and former director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an essential figure in the unwinding of America's longest war. Why can't we legalize medical marijuana for medical purposes, for medical patients? It's about the kids. Why can't we legally regulate marijuana for adults? It's about the kids. But when you get on narcotics it's like starting a never-ending downward tailspin from 30,000 feet. You become less sure of yourself, your surroundings, your friends. Chorals are more frequent with your parents and loved ones. You think of little else but another blow-up. Your newfound language for smoking marijuana. Now that turned out to be all bullshit, but now we have that same rhetoric, those same arguments happening with the war on tobacco and nicotine products. Tobacco is a loaded pistol and time pulls the trigger. Since 2009, the FDA has had the authority to regulate the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products. This move received praise from Big Tobacco because their products, like the traditional cigarette, were grandfathered in. In 2016, the agency determined that vapes counted as tobacco products and fell under the agency's purview. Eventually, this would make it nearly impossible to bring new brands of e-cigarettes to market. So it's created this perverse situation where the most dangerous tobacco products on the market are virtually untouched and the ones that pretty much everyone agrees are far, far safer are getting taken off the market. Now manufacturers have to convince the FDA that sale of their products is appropriate for the protection of public health. So far, the agency has determined that just three brands meet the test, all of which contain tobacco-flavored nicotine only, even though a majority of adult vapors prefer flavored options. All the rest, according to the FDA, are marketed unlawfully and subject to enforcement action at the FDA's discretion. As of September 2021, the FDA has ordered more than five million e-cigarette products off the market, and they have indefinitely delayed making a decision on the market leader, Juul. E-cigarettes had divided the medical community. The American Long Association says bluntly, e-cigarettes are not safe, but the American Cancer Society, on the other hand, says they are, quote, significantly less harmful for adults than smoking regular cigarettes. As far as high school fads, which often come and go, this one seems to be sticking, and there's a lot of concern about it. There is a perceived harmlessness with this, but that's not the case. Vaping may not be a particularly healthy habit, but most health authorities and even the FDA can see that vaping is substantially safer than smoking. Credible estimates suggest that millions of premature deaths could be prevented by a widespread transition from combustion to vapor, notes Greer. Yet, five states and more than 300 local jurisdictions have passed additional restrictions on flavored tobacco or nicotine products, knocking many popular brands off the market. They're basically allowing big tobacco to continue to profit from selling their cancer sticks. Nadelman says that cigarette prohibitionists failed to learn crucial lessons from the failure of the drug war. We are in this kind of collective hysterical mindset that really resembles what happened with the war on drugs back in the late 80s and 90s. So the fact of the matter is that even if all these cumulative public health efforts and people coming to their own realization result in a radical reduction of smoking in the U.S., it still means don't go to full-scale prohibition. Don't go there because of the harms that will result in terms of generating a vast black market that really begins to resemble and potentially transcend what we saw with heroin, cocaine, ephemphetamine, and now illicit fentanyl. Driving markets underground eliminates quality control, such as in 2019 when contaminated black market weed vapes led to nearly 2,500 hospitalizations and 60 deaths. It was a very scary thing where people were getting severe lung damage, even dying. It became evident fairly quickly that the cause of that was oil-based sickness used in mostly illicit THC devices. So realistically, it didn't have anything to do with nicotine vaping. Black market purveyors had added that dilute and vitamin E acetate to their products, which turned out to be the culprit. But the media's reporting on the topic led many consumers to draw the false conclusion that e-cigarettes alone pose a substantial risk. CDC officials now say vitamin E acetate, an additive sometimes used in e-cigarette products, may be linked to the national outbreak. There are two epidemics going on right now. There's an epidemic of lung injury associated with e-cigarette or vaping products primarily containing THC. There's a second epidemic right now, skyrocketing rates of teen use of e-cigarettes, the nicotine containing e-cigarettes. A majority of Americans in recent years believe that vaping nicotine is as or more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. But vaping isn't the only product regulators are pushing into the black market. The FDA recently announced its plans to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. These products are already prohibited in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. There's a case that hasn't got much attention where police in Massachusetts staked out a small Latin American clothing store. Very, very small time. And they saw a customer leaving the store with Newport menthol cigarettes, which are now contraband in the state of Massachusetts to sell. And so police went in. They seized both alcohol and tobacco, just small amounts, but they laid it out like a drug bust on a table. But they arrested the owner of the store for this and devoted their police resources to it. I think there's just been not a lot of self-reflection among advocates of cracking down on different tobacco products about what the real effects will be. NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo placed Gardner in a chokehold while attempting to arrest him in 2014. Gardner, who had been selling loose cigarettes, then died after telling officers, quote, I can't breathe. Eric Gardner was initially approached by police under suspicion of selling individual cigarettes, which is essentially a way of getting around taxes and selling them more cheaply. When these dealers come in and start selling, whether small or large amounts of menthol cigarettes or flavored e-cigarettes, violating the ban itself doesn't get them in trouble, but selling the products on a black market does. And that can mean years in prison. The war on drugs is not just about arrest and incarceration, but all the civil sanctions that prevent people from getting access to public housing, access to any types of welfare benefits, access to student loans, I mean, all, you know, having their children taken away from them, you know, having this used against them in a divorce proceeding. The more intense this criminalization gets, the more it's going to invite evermore organized forms of criminal behavior. We're criminal organizations which are already involved in smuggling cigarettes from low-tax jurisdictions to high-tax ones, whether it's domestically in the U.S. from southern states to northern states, or whether it's from the U.S. to Canada. There's this really obvious tension between the progressive desire to stop people from taking up a deadly habit and protecting individual choice and preventing abusive policing. How do we resolve that tension? Harm reduction. You can drastically reduce the harms of smoking and the use of cigarettes if consumers have access to a much safer product. The most famous example of this is Sweden, where they use a product called snus, which is a form of oral tobacco that is far, far safer than smoking. Unfortunately, snus is illegal throughout much of Europe, so its impact has been limited. Both England and some scientists here are looking at the best science, and we see the same thing. E-cigarettes are way less harmful than cigarettes, and they can and do help smokers switch if they can't quit. Ultimately, it's going to take some real courageous political leadership. You know, in the way that we saw Kurt Schmoe, the mayor of Baltimore back in the late 80s, step up at a conference of mayors and saying the war on drugs is the wrong way to go. Who's really winning and who's losing in this war on drugs? I see a strategy that is not only failed, but it can't be made to win. That is, every time we pour in these heavy law enforcement resources, we inflate the risk which drives up the price, which brings more people in trafficking and more profits to drug dealers. As the war on drugs winds down, the war on tobacco is ramping up. Upwards of 10 million consumers will no longer be able to visit independent vape shops to buy customizable components for open systems or choose from a wide variety of flavors and nicotine concentrations to smoke. And in 2020, teen smoking rates ticked up, maybe because the government is making the most popular alternative more expensive and harder to get. And the recent FDA announcement to ban menthol smoking products, including menthol e-cigarettes, will only make matters worse. So when you see people who are pushing for bans on menthol or flavored tobacco, they always try to emphasize that it's a regulatory matter. They pitch it as just a product regulation with only benign effects. The reality, of course, is much more complicated because there is still demand for these products. This is what I was really looking for. Menthol cigarette, where you can taste the tobacco.