The FDA’s damaging effort to ban flavored cigars

Imagine if a foreign government passed a law that shredded personal freedom, decimated an industry relied upon by generations of working families, exacerbated ethnic tensions, and put law enforcement in the crosshairs.

Such an act is normally associated with totalitarian regimes like Russia or China. Yet right here in the Land of Liberty, the U.S. government is proposing such an act in the form of a ban on flavored cigars.

Smoking cigars, cigarettes, and pipes have been part of American culture since our earliest days. Large swaths of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina developed thanks to the demand for this important plant. However, the 1990s were an inflection point. That decade saw years of efforts by consumer advocates to vilify large cigarette manufacturers come to a head in the form of legal settlements and ongoing anti-tobacco marketing campaigns.

Left unscathed for years were cigars. Typically used in a much different manner than cigarettes, and bereft of a correlation with youth smoking, cigars have remained the domain of adults to enjoy in both unflavored (i.e. the taste of the tobacco only) and flavored varieties.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration—now tasked with regulated tobacco—has resurrected its 1990s-era anti-tobacco playbook and trained its sights on cigars. FDA is seeking to not only ban flavored cigars, but also to evaluate the usage of unflavored cigars…likely with an eye toward also banning or otherwise limiting their usage.  

FDA claims this is being done in the name of curbing youth smoking. However, as former youths ourselves, we know that cigars—flavored or otherwise—have never been heavily desired by the youth. FDA’s own statistics bear this out, as they acknowledge that only 0.6 percent of youth smoke flavored cigars. Put another way, less than one student out of 100 in a given high school is smoking flavored cigars.

The real target is found in the regulatory docket where FDA mentions “young adults” as part of their target for this rulemaking. Bear in mind that “young adults” — which the agency defines as 18-24 year olds — have reached the age of majority and are free to make their own decisions within the law (which states that tobacco can be consumed at 21 years of age). Thus, FDA is not only seeking to contravene congressional intent, but it is giving itself parent-like authority over the lives of fully-grown, independent adults.

Allowing FDA — or any government agency — to become our “parent” should scare every American. Such an agency could then use this newfound “parental” authority to eliminate gasoline-powered cars and gas stoves, limit the consumption of beef, and tell you how much soda you can drink. If you think this is unreasonable alarmism, remember how government agencies used COVID-19 to limit every facet of personal liberty — regardless of law or Constitutional authority.  

Strangely, this naked attempt to grab your personal freedoms is not the only negative result of FDA’s proposed flavor ban. If the FDA’s effort is successful, states and municipalities that collect excise taxes from cigars stand to lose more than $400 million in revenue. State-level tax collections could dip by $150 million. While these numbers seem small on a national scale, they are crucial to state and local budgets, especially given the propensity of governments to support programs such as children’s health care and education with so-called ‘sin’ taxes. Thus, the real risk to the youth comes not from smoking a flavored cigar, but from the loss of important program funding generated by the legal, adult consumption of flavored cigars.  

Tax issues also open the door to other negative social consequences of flavor bans. Given that prohibition creates black markets, the job of policing these markets will fall to law enforcement. That means local police — already dealing with the fallout of high-profile cases such as Eric Garner — will again be asked to put their lives and community reputation on the line for something with no public benefit. As the Garner case have shown, the only result will be greater division among Americans and needless animosity toward law enforcement.

The Food & Drug Administration has failed to make a credible case for banning flavored cigars. Its proposal has set the stage for the theft of personal liberties that so many Americans hold dear, placed the livelihoods of working families at risk, and made our dedicated law enforcement officers into the “bad guys” once again. That’s why it is high time to block this regulatory effort — and remind the FDA that it is merely a safety regulator, not an overbearing parent to millions of Americans.  

Phillip L. Bell is director of external relations for FreedomWorks, Inc.