The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is obliged to protect the public health.
In 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act extended its purview to tobacco products.
In 2019, scientists at its Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) were directed to “eyeball” data. The agency retaliated when they objected.
In 2022, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel disclosed that wrongdoing. The agency was supposed to self-correct, but it didn’t.
In 2025, CTP authorized the first U.S. sale of oral pouch products containing nicotine extracted from tobacco. That determination was flawed and the agency promised a correction, but it hasn’t.
Instead, it continued unscientific, ignorant, and misleading arguments in its role to regulate tobacco products. In AGENTS OF THE CURRENT THINKING, former CTP toxicologist Christy Leppanen, Ph.D., shares a sample of those arguments and their outcomes.
The FDA is granted a broad authority to choose how it enforces the law, exercising enforcement discretion to exclude itself from its own policies that govern scientific integrity. That unchecked freedom, under conflicting agendas and performative oversight, has allowed the agency to stray from its mission, with leadership that enforce an unwritten CURRENT THINKING to support predetermined decisions to deny or allow the sale of tobacco products in the United States.
Despite the profits made from addicting Americans to nicotine, this isn’t a rebuke of Big Tobacco or of the tobacco industry. It is a reprimand of wrongdoing by Big Government that persists regardless of the products, politics, or mechanisms in place to ensure objectivity.
We fail to fix some problems because we don’t bother understanding what they are. The focus becomes the size of government instead of how it works, where wrongdoing continues via each choice by each individual about their own behavior, and problems persist regardless of the people in power.
This is the story of a regulatory agency misaligned with its mission, mandates, & messaging, where superficial oversight has created a U.S. tobacco market that is effectively unregulated.
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The FDA is required to but has not published the quantities of 93 harmful and potentially harmful constituents in tobacco products “in each brand and subbrand of tobacco product, in a way that people find understandable and not misleading.”
How would that information empower citizens to inform their own health decisions?
How would the availability of that information to healthcare providers benefit their patients?
How would the availability of that information to researchers and regulatory scientists advance science and regulatory science?
How would the availability of that information to individuals, healthcare providers, researchers, and regulatory scientists benefit our public health, economy, and wellbeing?
Why is that information not made available?
Should any additional constituents be considered?
The FDA has failed in its mission to regulate tobacco products.
What changes are needed to successfully implement the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act?
What other entities might help ensure that success, and how?
Congress has failed in its oversight of the Center for Tobacco Products.
What improvements are needed to ensure appropriate oversight?
What other entities or mechanisms will ensure appropriate oversight?
Outline and describe the effort and resources needed to regulate tobacco products.
Gold Standard Science policies apply across the Department of Health and Human Services.
Describe other examples where Gold Standard Science was not used.
In each case, why do you think Gold Standard Science was not used?
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Note: Referenced information was available at URLs until February 4th, 2026. To report a dead link or missing information, please click: here.
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The first Trump administration blindfolded, zip tied, and drove an already struggling federal agency off a cliff. The Biden administration then played politics and let it dangle on a thin tether. And the second Trump administration cut the cable.
Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, and have since collectively failed to ensure its effective implementation. Both sides have failed our public health.
