The annual E-Cigarette Summit in Washington, DC, is perhaps the most eclectic conference in tobacco control.
Consumer advocates, vape shop owners, academics, researchers, regulators and industry executives all gathered on May 17, as they have for the past several years.
Perhaps more than anything, the conference is a rare opportunity to publicly levy questions at higher-ups in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an agency not known for its transparency. So it didn’t take long for attendees to rise during the Q&A sessions and ask Matthew Holman, the director of the Office of Science at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), and Kathleen Crosby, the director of CTP’s Office of Health Communication and Education, why the FDA has continued to communicate so poorly the “continuum of risk”—the idea that some nicotine products are significantly safer than others.
That became the theme for much of the afternoon: Now that the FDA was finally authorizing some vapor products through its often-criticized and onerous premarket tobacco production application (PMTA) process, why was the public still so massively misinformed about e-cigarettes?
Alex Norcia – Filter – 2022-05-19.
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