Why isn’t the Food and Drug Administration celebrating the decline in youth tobacco use?

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently quietly posted a ZIP file on its website containing the 2025 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), the federal government’s benchmark study for tracking tobacco use among kids.

Each year, senior FDA staff and officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention normally issue public statements about what the numbers mean and show. This year, there was silence.

I ran the numbers and found a wealth of good news about youth smoking. High school e-cigarette use now stands at 7.1 percent, down from 27.5 percent in 2019. Cigarette use among youth has collapsed to 1.8 percent. Use of nicotine pouches, which have become popular in many workplaces over the last two years, is just 2.2 percent. By any measure, these are great public health numbers.

The “youth vaping epidemic” that once animated congressional hearings, spurred demands for prohibition, and generated years of intense news coverage is a thing of the past.

However, the silence that greeted these findings reveals a great deal about how government regulators operate. When youth tobacco numbers spike, the FDA calls press conferences, publishes urgent reports, and loudly demands new enforcement powers and more funding.

When numbers fall to historic lows, the agency posts a ZIP file and hopes nobody notices. The NYTS is the gold standard when it allegedly justifies regulating adult products in the name of protecting children. It fades into irrelevance when it doesn’t.

The FDA’s selective relationship with its data isn’t just hypocritical; it affects policy at the federal and state levels. There are 28 million Americans who still smoke cigarettes. Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in this country, with hundreds of thousands of deaths yearly attributable to smoking.

More than a decade’s worth of research consistently finds that e-cigarettes and other smoke-free alternatives like nicotine pouches and heated tobacco products are substantially less harmful than combustible cigarettes. For adult smokers who cannot or will not quit nicotine, switching represents a meaningful, potentially lifesaving reduction in risk.

Cliff Douglas, formerly of the American Cancer Society and Global Action to End Smoking, notes that among Americans 55 and older, the group most likely to suffer from smoking-related disease, smoking rates fell just 2 percentage points, from 18.7 percent in 2016 to 16.7 percent in 2023. These are the people with the most to gain from quitting or switching to safer alternatives. They are also the population most consistently failed by the FDA.

The FDA has authorized a handful of e-cigarettes, almost exclusively in tobacco flavors that few adult smokers find appealing. A major reason for the agency’s chokehold on smoke-free alternatives has been their alleged appeal to youth. The result is that the substantial adult demand for reduced-risk alternatives is being met by a gray and black market that has rushed in to fill the gap. In 2024, unauthorized vapes accounted for 86 percent of e-cigarette sales.

Congress has noticed. Seventy-one Republican lawmakers recently urged the administration to treat the flood of illegal Chinese vapes as a national security concern, citing cartel involvement, cybersecurity risks from internet-connected devices, and products being sold near military bases and schools. Even with this large black market, youth use of vapes and other nicotine products remains low, as shown by the 2025 NYTS.

Enforcement alone cannot solve a problem that the FDA created through regulatory excess. You cannot strangle a legal market, watch an illegal one explode in its place, and then act bewildered when the illegal market proves difficult to police. The path forward requires the FDA to do two things it has so far refused to do in good faith: authorize more reduced-risk products for adult smokers and communicate clearly that not all nicotine products carry the same level of risk.

The 2025 NYTS is good news, but it should also prompt a reassessment of the FDA’s performance as a tobacco regulator. Is the goal to prevent kids from using nicotine and help those adult smokers who want to quit do so, or is it to try to regulate its way to a nicotine-free society?

The former is within grasp; the latter is an impossible fantasy. Children should not be used as a shield to deny adults access to products that may save their lives, especially when these products aren’t appealing to kids in the first place.

A version of this column first appeared in DC Journal.

The post Why isn’t the Food and Drug Administration celebrating the decline in youth tobacco use? appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Source: https://reason.org/commentary/why-isnt-the-food-and-drug-administration-celebrating-the-decline-in-youth-tobacco-use/