CONSUMER ACTION FOR A STRONG ECONOMY OPPOSES FDA FLAVORED CIGAR BAN AS
VIOLATING CONSUMER RIGHTS: “HEAVY-HANDED, TOP-DOWN AND VIRTUALLY EVIDENCE-FREE”

July 29, 2022

(Alexandria, VA) – Consumer Action for a Strong Economy (CASE), the nation’s foremost non-profit, non-partisan organization devoted to promoting consumer interests through the advancement of free-market principles, has written U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Robert Califf opposing his agency’s proposed ban on flavored cigars as a “heavy-handed, top-down and virtually evidence-free approach” that “violates the core principle of empowering consumers at every avenue.”

Observing that consumer trust in public-health agencies is already at a low ebb after their intrusive and failed approaches in addressing COVID and precipitating a baby formula shortage, CASE Chairman Gerard Daniel Scimeca excoriates FDA for forwarding “another top-down edict to bar a product used by at most five percent of adults, the vast majority consuming no more than two cigars a day with little effect on morbidity or mortality, and less than one percent of middle-and-high-schoolers.”

At the same time, observes Scimeca, “The Agency is straining mightily yet unpersuasively to come up with any scientific evidence of the effect any flavor ban would have on initiation, youth usage or mortality” and “waves away the likelihood that banning popular products will lead to counterfeiting and contraband sales that will sap the clear effectiveness of recently passed Tobacco 21 laws, even as it forwards abundant evidence of the potentially devastating effect of the rule on small manufacturing, distribution and retail businesses.”

The CASE Chairman points out that “even CDC (the Centers for Disease Control) has come to recognize, in relation to COVID decision-making, that public health should be about empowering citizens, as consumers, with the information they need to make educated choices about their own well-being” and maintains that the same approach should be taken with “a lifestyle choice that the FDA, reaching with all its strength, concludes would result in, at best, marginal improvements in morbidity and mortality.”

CASE concludes by accusing FDA of “further costly empire-building in the area of tobacco regulation in pursuit of a possibly moderately beneficial, but more likely counterproductive, rule” and calls on the agency to”pull the plug on the proposed flavor product standard in favor of empowering citizens with accurate information about the minimal risks of cigars as used.”

The full CASE comment can be found HERE: