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I thought the whole purpose of cigarettes was to give you that nicotine buzz?

I know when I smoked them I loved the nicotine buzz!!!!

And of course I also had a nicotine addiction, which some studies have shown to be about as bad as being addicted to heroin.

I'm sure if they make nicotine illegal or more or less ban it, we will have a whole new "war on nicotine", which will be the same failure of the current "war on drugs"

And while nicotine is a deadly drug that causes numerous health problems, I have read that it's a lot safer, to get you nicotine via vaping, where you don't smoke tobacco, which has a whole slew of other dangerous drugs in it.

Source

Allhands: Can the FDA make cigarettes less addictive? 2 reasons to be skeptical

Joanna Allhands, opinion columnist Published 6:07 a.m. MT March 19, 2018 | Updated 9:21 a.m. MT March 19, 2018

The Food and Drug Administration plans to drastically cut nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them less addictive, according to multiple news outlets. Veuer's Sam Berman has the full story. Buzz60

Joanna Allhands: The FDA is investigating a mandate to remove most of the nicotine from cigarettes, and there are two reasons why that gives me pause.

The Food and Drug Administration is proposing a new mandate to remove most of the nicotine from cigarettes.

And public-health people are praising the move, saying it would save millions of lives.

FDA says 5 million will quit smoking

Research suggests that those who smoke cigarettes with lower nicotine levels experience fewer cravings and smoke fewer cigarettes.

The agency predicts that vastly lowering nicotine levels to 0.4 milligrams per cigarette would prompt five million people to quit in a year and prevent 33 million people from becoming regular smokers by 2100.

That’s huge, presuming that:

1) The move doesn’t create a huge black market for cigarettes with higher nicotine content (which I presume it will).

2) The industry doesn’t embrace the spiel that their new, lower, nicotine cigarettes are less addictive (I can see the stickers now: Now with 75 percent less nicotine!).

Because a lot of teens might think, well, why not? If cigarettes aren’t addictive anymore, I can smoke whenever I want and stop whenever I want. A puff here and there won’t kill me.

Vaping market effectively made that spiel

Valley expert says liquid nicotine can be deadly if a child gets a hold of it.

That, essentially, is what has driven an alarming increase in teens vaping, because they believe the spiel that puffing nicotine through electronic cigarettes is a safer alternative to smoking.

That’s not necessarily the case. Research has revealed all sorts of nasty things, including heavy concentrations of toxic metals like lead, in the vapor people are inhaling. The jury’s still out on what secondhand vapor from e-cigarettes does to nonsmokers’ lungs.

Not to mention that one cartridge of JUUL, a popular brand of e-cigarette that looks like a USB stick, contains as much nicotine as a whole pack of cigarettes.

Yet, oddly, while the FDA proposal wants to vastly trim the nicotine in cigarettes, it also supports moving people to what it considers lower risk products, including e-cigarettes.

Let’s hope their rules do a better job of defining what exactly is a lower-risk e-cigarette.

Nixing nicotine won’t make smoking safer

And let’s be clear: Removing nicotine – either by genetically modifying tobacco or chemically extracting it from the processed product – won’t make cigarettes any safer.

Study after study has revealed hundreds of carcinogens in cigarette smoke, including lead and arsenic. Smoking negatively affects your heart, your lungs, your bones, your mouth, your eyes … yeah, just about your whole body.

This isn’t news. Anti-smoking campaigns have been making these points for years. And it’s good that they have. Only about 15 percent of Americans smoke these days, a 50-year low.

New research also suggests that smoking may no longer be the leading cause of preventable death. Obesity is. But the FDA isn’t taking nearly as drastic steps to stop that epidemic.

Some people will smoke, even if it kills them I’m not saying that smoking isn’t a public health problem, because it is. And no, of course I don’t want to see people trapped in an addiction to cigarettes. I don’t doubt that lowering the nicotine content will help some people break the habit.

But I also recognize that pretty much everyone who starts smoking these days does so knowing full well what it will do to them. And there will always be a segment of the population that chooses to smoke, whether cigarettes have a ton of nicotine in them or not.

That’s why the proposed FDA rule gives me pause.

It seems dangerous to tell teens that one of the major consequences to smoking no longer exists. And it seems like a bad idea to move nicotine to the black market, where products could emerge that kill people even faster.

Reach Allhands at joanna.allhands@arizonarepublic.com.