Monthly Archives: November 2015

by Carl V Phillips

If U.S. FDA had succeeded in banning e-cigarettes in 2009 as they did a decade before that, it would have been a bad policy action for many reasons. It would have served no legitimate purpose, violated the mission and spirit (and, according to Judge Leon, the letter) of the FD&C act, violated the ethical norms of free society, dramatically lowered the welfare of many people while making pretty much no one better off, and hurt the public’s health. But at least it would have been a fairly conservative incremental policy. Relatively few people were using the products and had not been doing so for very long. A few small businesses depended on it. It turns out that enormous benefits would have been lost. But at the time, the action would have been a relatively modest departure from the status quo.

This contrasts sharply with the present FDA plan to ban e-cigarettes (for that is what it is) which has all those other negative characteristics and additionally suffers from being a radical departure from a status quo in which millions of Americans use e-cigarettes at least occasionally, and probably hundreds of thousands rank them in importance below only basic necessities, friends, and family. A multifaceted industry and an entire culture have formed around them. The changes in the world that would be brought about by the ban are staggering.  Continue reading →

by Carl V Phillips

Continuing the assessment of FDA’s proposed regulation (as far as we can anticipate what it says). For background, see the CASAA newsletter and the recent posts here. As already noted, the proposed “regulation” is really a ban on sales of all existing e-cigarettes with a provision that will probably (but might not) allow a handful of closed-system products, that FDA hand picks, back on the market. But whether regulation or ban, it can only be justified in order to solve problems. So what problems is it ostensibly solving? To understand the proposal or respond to it, it is necessary to identify those — as a separate point from looking at the downsides — and address what benefits might result. Continue reading →

by Carl V Phillips

A recent news poll asked people, “Do you believe e-cigarettes should be regulated by the FDA like tobacco products?”, and 57% said “yes”. The main lesson from that is that people who are clueless about survey research should not be allowed to do survey research. Any moderately competent researcher would realize that answers to that question are meaningless when the respondents have no idea what they are being asked. If forced to field such a question, an honest researcher would have also asked one or more questions about how FDA regulates tobacco products and, after discovering that not a single respondent was anywhere close to right (I am pretty confident that would be the result), would dismiss the responses to the first question as meaningless.

An honest and skilled researcher only asks questions such that the respondent actually knows what they are answering: “Do you believe that FDA should ban all e-cigarette products, followed by allowing a few of the largest companies to spend $20 million per product to beg permission to allow a product or two onto the market, applications which FDA would then grant or deny based not on any rules but on their political whim or political connections, with the result being less than 20 expensive and low-efficiency products remaining on the market?” That is the question the respondents were answering, they just did not know it. No doubt some respondents still would have said “yes” — haters gonna hate — but not nearly as many. Continue reading →