When I was 14 years old, I lost my father to lung cancer. He was 53 and smoked two packs of Camels a day. I have made it a priority during my time in Congress to champion policies that help spare others from this tragedy.
Smoking rates have hit record lows. In 1988, I passed legislation that banned smoking on domestic flights, marking the start of cigarettes disappearing from public spaces.
But Big Tobacco did not fade away like a cloud of smoke. They rebranded with flashy new products: vaping and e-cigarettes. And they followed the same playbook they used to sell Marlboros: target our children. They marketed their addictive products in kid-friendly flavors such as cool mint, fruit punch, and banana split.
Sadly, it’s working. Since 2014, e-cigarettes have become the most common form of tobacco products among youth. That is why I’ve introduced bipartisan legislation to crack down on e-cigarette companies that target children with kid-friendly flavors, introduced bicameral legislation to update federal tobacco taxes to ensure they remain effective public health tools, and have repeatedly called on the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Justice to better enforce federal laws against the unlawful sale of unauthorized e-cigarette products.
But now Big Tobacco has found an ally in the Trump administration.
On May 8, the FDA did something it has never done before. After pressure from President Trump, the agency for the first time authorized flavored e-cigarettes from one company. Despite years of acknowledging that flavors play a unique role in addicting children, the FDA reversed itself and gave the green light for a well-heeled tobacco company to load up store shelves with vapes in flavors like blueberry and mango.
This disastrous gift to one tobacco company was exacerbated a few days later when it was announced that thousands of other e-cigarette products would be allowed to remain on the market without the lawfully required premarket authorization from FDA. (Previously, the products had been unlawfully marketed, but the FDA had been slow and ineffective in removing them from the market.)
The law is clear: E-cigarette companies must prove to the FDA that their products are “appropriate for the protection of the public health” before they are allowed to be sold in the United States. Yet, in one fell swoop — and with the ouster of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who rightly had concerns about the role that flavors play in addicting children to nicotine — Trump unilaterally decided that these toxic products should be widely available to kids across our country, despite failing to follow the law’s requirement to first obtain FDA authorization.
With these decisions to authorize fruit-flavored vaping products, and unlawfully allow for the sale of fruit-, candy-, and dessert-flavored e-cigarette products absent the legally required FDA review, Trump has willingly exposed an entire generation of children to Big Tobacco’s nicotine addiction. Tobacco giants who recently dined with President Trump at his golf resort, and donated heavily to his campaign and golden ballroom, apparently secured the favorable treatment they so desperately wanted.
Formaldehyde, chromium, heavy metals like nickel and lead — all of these are prevalent in e-cigarettes. Recent studies continue to raise alarms about the likely possibility that vaping products can cause cancer. But now the administration supposedly committed to “Make America Healthy Again” is poised to unleash a new wave of addiction.
In response to my questioning in a Senate hearing last week, none of the six senior health officials — all physicians or Ph.D.s — testifying on behalf of the National Institutes of Health could condone these decisions. The NIH director himself conceded, “Kids having more access to vaping does not make sense to me.”
But here we are: Dangerous, addictive nicotine products, clearly intended to appeal to children — with flavors like cotton candy, bubblegum, and mint — will be sold in vape shops and convenience stores nationwide, without proper regulation or oversight. More American children will become addicted to nicotine. Those who become addicted to nicotine via e-cigarettes are more likely to go on to smoke cigarettes. More young people will grow up to develop cancer and other devastating health conditions. There will be more needless suffering and death.
With this decision, Donald Trump showed that he cares more about monuments and gaudy displays of fealty than he does the health of our nation’s children. Statues in his likeness will surely be erected at the headquarters of tobacco giants Reynolds American and Altria. To Trump, that will be worth the price of another generation of children lost to nicotine addiction.
Dick Durbin, a Democrat, is the senior U.S. senator from Illinois.
