Less than two weeks left in his term, and President Joe Biden is making a lot of Americans very unhappy on his way out of office.
Yesterday, Biden issued an executive order that has banned new oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters on Monday, using a 70-year-old law that could limit President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to easily reverse the decision.
Today, it was reported that Biden announced the transfer of 11 Yemeni detainees, including two former bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, being held at a U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to Oman in an effort to “re-settle” them.
Now, Biden and his team are looking to stick it to the American consumer before he leaves office with a ban on this popular consumer product.
The Biden-led Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving forward with a regulatory rule that would effectively ban cigarettes currently on the market in favor of products with lower nicotine levels.
However, the move, which looks good on paper, could end up boosting business for drug cartels operating on the black market, an expert says.
“Biden’s ban is a gift with a bow and balloons to organized crime cartels with it, whether it’s cartels, Chinese organized crime, or Russian mafia. It’s going to keep America smoking, and it’s going to make the streets more violent,” Rich Marianos, former assistant director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the current chair of the Tobacco Law Enforcement Network, told Fox News.
The FDA confirmed yesterday that as of January 3, the Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Level of Certain Tobacco Products had completed a regulatory review, but that the proposed rule has not yet been finalized.
“The proposed rule, ‘Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Level of Certain Tobacco Products,’ is displaying in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) ROCIS system as having completed regulatory review on January 3,” said an FDA spokesman.
“As the FDA has previously said, a proposed product standard to establish a maximum nicotine level to reduce the addictiveness of cigarettes and certain other combusted tobacco products, when finalized, is estimated to be among the most impactful population-level actions in the history of U.S. tobacco product regulation. At this time, the FDA cannot provide any further comment until it is published.”
The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was signed into law in 2009 by former President Barack Obama, which granted the FDA the power to regulate tobacco products.
Since then, the agency has worked to lower nicotine levels, including in July 2017 under the Trump administration, when then-FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced it would seek to require tobacco companies to drastically cut nicotine in cigarettes in an effort to help adult smokers quit.
In 2022, the FDA under the Biden administration announced plans for the proposed rule that would lower levels of nicotine so they were less addictive or non-addictive.
“Lowering nicotine levels to minimally addictive or non-addictive levels would decrease the likelihood that future generations of young people become addicted to cigarettes and help more currently addicted smokers to quit,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said at the time.
But while merit based to curb health complications from smoking, experts say lowering the levels of nicotine in commonly purchased cigarettes and other tobacco products would open the floodgates to the illicit trafficking of tobacco products into the U.S.
“This decision is being thrown down the public’s throat without one ounce of thought and preparation. Nobody sat down with law enforcement, nobody sat down with any doctors, No one sat down with any regulators to find out, ‘Hey, look, what are the unintended ramifications of such a poor choice,’ and that’s what I’m going to call it, a poor choice,” Marianos said.
Marianos told Fox News that Mexican cartels are well-positioned to bring illegal tobacco across the border, as they do with substances such as fentanyl that have devastated communities across the U.S., while Chinese criminal organizations have some of the best counterfeit operations stretching from baby formula to cigarettes, and Russian organized crime groups have their foot in the door in cities across the nation, including in bodegas and other stores that sell tobacco products.
The White House has yet to comment on the proposed ban