Why the White House’s tobacco proposal is such a big deal

Yesterday the Trump administration proposed stripping the FDA of its authority to regulate tobacco products. They would be regulated instead by a new agency headed by its own Senate-confirmed commissioner. The plan was panned by tobacco control advocates and former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, who spearheaded the FDA’s foray into tobacco regulation in the 1990s. 

“This has all the fingerprints of wanting to deregulate and set back tobacco control [regulations],” Kessler told STAT. “I heard the same arguments from the tobacco industry in the early 1990s.”

To fully understand the magnitude of the proposal, you need to understand the decades-long fight waged by the FDA to get the power to regulate tobacco. Tobacco regulation became an almost obsessive pursuit of Kessler, who waged a nearly six-year campaign that even included the use of an industry informant dubbed Deep Cough to craft a scheme for regulating tobacco. The plan was so contentious that Kessler once took to locking his policy documents in a safe kept by the FDA’s current top tobacco regulator, Mitch Zeller. 

In his memoir, Kessler even describes his strategy to convince then-President Bill Clinton to support the controversial effort.  

“I continued to look for every opportunity to reach the inner circles of the White House, even asking [former FDA official] Ann Witt to send a note to a childhood friend that wrote speeches for Mrs. Clinton. I wanted to contact anyone who had the President’s ear,” Kessler wrote, describing his strategy of “surrounding the president with advocates for our initiative.”

Despite Kessler’s nonstop work on the issue, it wasn’t until 2009 when Congress passed the Tobacco Control Act that the FDA finally got the authority to regulate tobacco — more than 30 years after advocacy groups first petitioned the FDA to regulate these products.