Agents of the Current Thinking

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is obliged to protect the public health. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 extended its purview to tobacco products.

In 2019, scientists at its Center for Tobacco Products were directed to “eyeball” data. The agency retaliated when they objected. In 2022, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel disclosed that wrongdoing. The agency was supposed to self-correct but didn’t. In 2025, the first U.S. sale of oral pouch products containing nicotine extracted from tobacco was authorized. That determination was flawed and the agency promised a correction, but it hasn’t. Instead, it continued unscientific, ignorant, and misleading arguments in its role to regulate tobacco products.

The FDA is granted a broad authority to choose how it enforces the law, exercising enforcement discretion to exclude itself from its own policies that govern scientific integrity. That unchecked freedom, under conflicting agendas and performative oversight, has allowed the agency to stray from its mission, with leadership that enforce an unwritten current thinking to support predetermined decisions to deny or allow the sale of tobacco products in the United States.

Despite profits made from addicting Americans to nicotine, this isn’t a rebuke of Big Tobacco or the tobacco industry. It is a reprimand of wrongdoing by Big Government that persists despite the products, politics, or mechanisms in place to ensure objectivity. We fail to fix problems when we don’t understand what they are. The focus becomes the size of government instead of how it works, where wrongdoing continues via each choice by each individual about their own behavior, and problems persist regardless of the people in power.

This is the story of a regulatory agency misaligned with its mission, mandates, and messaging, where superficial oversight has created a U.S. tobacco market that is effectively unregulated.