Success from failure: US federal commercial tobacco regulation

Abstract

The history of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulation of tobacco products is fraught with failures. A first effort to regulate tobacco products was completely dismantled. Despite robust authority to act, the current iteration of the FDA has also struggled to succeed. While the public health community may be frustrated by the lack of progress to date, recent developments have potentially shown advocates a pathway for success.

Supervenience and the Public Health Standard for Psychoactive Substances

“…The philosophers of science have much more rigorous debates about the nature of supervenience, but Public Health assumes the existence of independent population-level (upstream) causes. The FDA has correctly set up a standard for evaluation based on public health, but reaching that standard may be more challenging than we realize [20]. Our methodologies for studying individual effects are much more developed with more advanced methods for identifying and addressing confounding.…”