At the end of December, Robert Califf, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Brian King, the director of the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), published an op-ed outlining a new framework to maximize smoking cessation.
In the piece, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the authors argue for a so-called smoking cessation “care package.”
This includes encouraging health systems to provide social and clinical support, offering medication and nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and moving forward on plans to ban menthol combustibles and lower the nicotine levels in cigarettes.
Though vapes are brought up—“further high-quality research,” they write, is needed on how e-cigarettes “may facilitate smoking cessation among adults”—there is scant mention of tobacco harm reduction (THR). Tobacco use, Califf and King correctly note, is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, but they fail to make it abundantly clear that the overwhelming majority of these fatalities are a result of smoking.
Alex Norcia – Filter – 2023-01-05.
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