Biden’s cigarette ban will enrich the Chinese Communist Party

With days left in office, the Biden White House has given the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the green light to advance a near-total cigarette ban that would present an enormous profit opportunity for Mexican cartels and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

This proposed rule would ban the sale of more than 99.9 percent of cigarettes currently sold in the U.S. by demanding tobacco companies remove almost all of the nicotine from their cigarettes. Banning an addictive product used daily by almost 30 million adults and worth tens of billions of dollars is replete with risk.

The U.S. cigarette market is a valuable prize for China and Mexican cartels seeking to diversify their revenue sources. Chinese cigarettes are products of the China National Tobacco Corporation. This state-owned monopoly generates between nine and 12 percent of the CCP’s revenue, making it one of the largest companies in China. A cigarette ban could increase these revenues as the Marlboro man disappears in favor of brands such as Chunghwa and Hongtashan smuggled in through American ports of entry.

No other country has yet experimented with a mandatory nicotine reduction in cigarettes. New Zealand passed legislation in 2022 enacting the same policy, but it was repealed before it could come into effect after the election of a conservative government.

A few places have banned tobacco outright, with predictably disastrous consequences. The Kingdom of Bhutan was the first to do so in 2004 and was widely praised by bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2021, the ban was repealed after smoking among youths rose and a profitable black market developed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, South Africa banned tobacco, but there was no significant reduction in smoking because illicit cigarettes flooded in from neighboring Zimbabwe.

A ban on cigarettes isn’t just counterproductive; it’s unnecessary. A “smoke-free country” is classified by the WHO as one where fewer than five percent of the population smokes. The U.S. has already achieved a nearly smoke-free generation with its youths, with just 1.4 percent of middle and high school kids saying they’ve tried a cigarette in the past 30 days. There is universal knowledge of the dangers of smoking. Cigarettes are taxed and highly regulated, and there are hardly any public places left in the U.S. for smokers to light up indoors.

For those smokers who would like to quit but so far have not been able to do so, it’s carrots, not sticks, that should be on the FDA’s agenda. The FDA should inform smokers that they can still get the nicotine they want without the smoke that may kill them if they switch to an e-cigarette, nicotine pouch, or heated tobacco product. All these products are vastly safer than cigarettes and could save millions of lives. Thanks to a combination of media misinformation and the FDA’s failure to provide the public with accurate information, a majority of the public and smokers believe alternatives like e-cigarettes are just as or more dangerous than smoking. 

Because the FDA failed over the past four years to authorize a sufficient number of American e-cigarettes for sale, a wave of illicit and unregulated vapes from China flooded in to satisfy consumer demand. Should the FDA achieve its goal of banning cigarettes, there’s little doubt what happened in the vape market will be repeated, only on a significantly larger scale.

The past four years of the FDA’s tobacco regulation resulted in a chaotic marketplace rife with illegally imported products, American companies fighting for years for their products to be authorized, growing misperceptions of the risks of different nicotine products, and the FDA having to defend itself in front of the Supreme Court for refusing to authorize e-cigarettes in non-tobacco and menthol flavors.

President-elect Trump’s new administration will inherit an unenviable state of affairs. However, there is also a significant opportunity to correct previous errors. The FDA’s rule to slash nicotine in cigarettes should be abandoned, and the agency should instead focus on protecting public health by providing accurate information about safer alternatives for smokers trying to quit and ensuring a well-regulated marketplace that is less vulnerable to smugglers and criminal networks.

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