Ms. Sward said that an industry that lied about hooking generations on a deadly product that killed millions was now positioned to control the next iteration of the nicotine market. “The industry has been waiting for their next big thing and they found it with e-cigarettes,” she said.
Kaelan Hollon, a spokeswoman for Reynolds American, R.J.R.’s parent company, said that the decision “represents an important moment for Reynolds” and that it showed that the authorized products “are appropriate for the protection of the public health.”
E-cigarettes first came on the American market in the early 2000s as devices designed to give smokers the nicotine fix they craved without the carcinogens that come from burning cigarettes. But about six years ago, with the introduction of Juul’s sleek products with fruity and dessert flavors, use of e-cigarettes among teenagers began to soar and public health officials worried that a generation of nonsmokers was becoming hooked on nicotine.
Allowing some vaping devices to stay on the market as an alternative to smoking, some public health experts believe, might make it easier for the government to impose more stringent regulation on traditional cigarettes, whose carcinogenic fumes can cause cancer and play a role in more than 400,000 deaths in the United States each year.
After resolving the vaping issue, the F.D.A.’s tobacco division will push forward on a plan to reduce the amount of nicotine in combustible cigarettes. In its tobacco control strategy, announced in July 2017, the F.D.A. said it would try to force tobacco companies to lower the nicotine in their products to nonaddictive levels. The cigarette industry opposes the move.
The F.D.A. is also still working on its plan to eliminate menthol cigarettes from the market, a prospect the tobacco industry is vigorously lobbying against.
Clifford Douglas, director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network, said that the authorization of Vuse was “good initial news in terms of the agency making clear its focus on providing well-assessed harm reduction alternatives for adults.”