RIP The Nic-Stick

They take your gains, your money, your reason to live, and now they take your nicotine or at least try. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced its plan to cut back on the amount of nicotine “levels in cigarettes sold in the United States to minimally or non-addictive levels, an effort that, if successful, could have an unprecedented effect in slashing smoking-related deaths and threaten a politically powerful industry.” 

The goal is to reduce the use in youths and the rise in addiction. The slashing of nicotine levels would save millions of lives over generations according to supporting officials. This would also lead to a drop in cancer rates. The first attack on nicotine dates back to 2021 when the goal was to ban menthol cigarettes but since then, senior officials have come to a reduction in nicotine levels. 

A brief overview on nicotine, if you care. Nicotine is a chemical that occurs in the tobacco plant. It, however, doesn’t cause cancer believe it or not. Its use is for cigarettes to be addictive. The cancer-causing products within the cigarettes are tar. When breathed in, the tar sticks to the grape-like sacks inside of your lungs called alveoli. Alveoli is where the gas exchange occurs, you know carbon dioxide to oxygen. They expand and contract when you breathe, just like your lungs but over time, through the use of cigarettes, the tar makes them sticky as residue remains after each puff, causing the alveoli to not be able to expand and eventually leading to COPD, lung cancer, and other breathing issues. A little lesson from my medical days. Back to the story…

This decision would be the biggest step by the U.S. government to curb smoking since a landmark legal settlement in 1998 when tobacco companies agreed to pay more than $200 billion to help states pay for healthcare. The first person to drop from the nicotine list is JUUL. The FDA announced that Juul Labs would no longer be allowed to sell to consumers in the US and the company must halt sales within 30 days. Juul is one of the top e-cigarette sellers in the country and has consistently felt scrutiny from the community for influencing a younger generation to smoke. As of this morning, the company has asked for a pause on the FDA’s ban in order to gather an argument against the case. That’s all for this article. It isn’t much but there isn’t much to write about in the market.