Winston Churchill once said that “If you destroy a free market you create a black market” and nowhere is the validity of that statement clearer than with drug prohibition.
Instead of eliminating drug use, prohibition spurred a flourishing illicit market. In the United States, lawmakers are just now coming to grips with the fact that the only way to eliminate illicit markets is to displace them with legal, regulated markets.
With cannabis, for example, states are currently in the process of balancing regulations to be strict enough to protect the public, but flexible enough to allow legitimate businesses to thrive and compete with their illicit counterparts. But unfortunately, this lesson remains unlearned when it comes to tobacco, as indicated by the half-baked effort to prohibit synthetic nicotine.
Slipped into the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill approved by President Biden last week was a provision giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate synthetic nicotine as a “tobacco product.” Supporters of the measure hail it as necessary to close a “loophole” that e-cigarette companies can use to evade federal regulation because the FDA’s authority over e-cigarettes was previously limited to nicotine derived from tobacco. The reality, however, is that this measure would have been unnecessary, and this loophole never used, if the FDA had only provided the e-cigarette industry with a realisticway to earn FDA approval and bring products to market legally.
Michelle Minton – Competitive Enterprise Institute – 2022-03-21.
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