On August 27, according to foreign reports, JONATHAN FOULDS, a tobacco researcher at Pennsylvania State University in the United States, expressed his views on nicotine, e-cigarettes, etc. The following is the full text:

Cigarettes are the only legal consumer product - when used as intended - that causes half of the premature deaths of long-term users.

In response to this long-standing health threat, the Biden administration recently announced plans to set new standards for combustible tobacco products to greatly reduce their addictive properties.

The New Zealand government recently announced a similar nicotine reduction strategy. It is a key component of the new smoke-free program.

Biden's plan is modeled on plans developed during Trump's presidency. Mitch Zeller, former director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, said the move could have the biggest public health impact in history.

So what does the proposal mean in practice?

When implemented - likely at least another three years - it will reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes and cigars by about 95 percent. Since nicotine is the addictive substance in tobacco, it makes these products almost non-addictive.

The purpose is twofold: to prevent addiction in young people and to help current smokers quit smoking more easily.

As a researcher who has focused on smoking cessation for over 30 years, I am impressed by any intervention that increases the quit rate among smokers. In one of our recent randomized clinical trials of very low-nicotine cigarettes, my Penn State research team and colleagues at Harvard found that people who switched to these cigarettes were more than four times more likely to quit.

This suggests that the public health benefits of successfully implemented cigarette nicotine reduction standards could be substantial.

A 2018 Food and Drug Administration study predicted that lowering cigarette nicotine standards could dramatically reduce smoking rates from around 13% today to less than 2% by 2060, preventing 16 million people from becoming regular smokers, and preventing 16 million people from becoming regular smokers. Prevent more than 2.8 million tobacco-related deaths.

Smoking can cause infertility, erectile dysfunction, cataracts, premature aging, hair loss and tooth loss. It is a major killer along with heart disease, stroke and cancer.

The proposed standard would not simply produce something resembling a light cigarette.

Light cigarettes, which have been on the market for decades, contain the same amount of nicotine as regular cigarettes—usually 10 to 15 milligrams. To meet the new standard, a cigarette may contain less than 0.5 milligrams.

So-called light or low-tar cigarettes have small holes in the filter that allow air to flow into the filter to dilute the smoke.

Light cigarettes have lower tar and nicotine content per puff when smoked by machine. However, when held by a person, these holes are often blocked by fingers, and a smoker can easily puff a little to inhale equal amounts of nicotine and tar.

Some skeptics of nicotine-reduction proposals have raised concerns that smokers may simply smoke reduced-nicotine cigarettes more intensely, just as they smoke light cigarettes.

However, dozens of studies have shown that smokers don't increase their smoking for cigarettes with very low nicotine content. Instead, within a short period of time, they found the new version less satisfying and began to taper off usage.

Those who used extremely low-nicotine cigarettes were also more likely to quit smoking in randomized trials.

When the Trump administration initially proposed reducing nicotine levels in cigarettes, Zeller and former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recognized that one of the main challenges to the program's success was that the regulation could lead to illegally high nicotine levels. Market cigarettes. Zeller and Gottlieb understand that a key way to prevent this from happening is to keep non-smoking nicotine products — especially e-cigarettes — on the market.

Compared to regular cigarettes, e-cigarettes provide smokers with a satisfactory level of nicotine while exposing users to significantly lower levels of toxic substances. Therefore, e-cigarettes are likely to be much less harmful.

A new study recently conducted by our team and colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University found that when smokers switched to cigarette-like nicotine-delivery e-cigarettes, a greater percentage eventually quit.

The potential of e-cigarettes to help replace smoking explains why, two days after Biden proposed drastically reducing the amount of nicotine allowed in cigarettes, the FDA surprised many by announcing that it effectively banned all sales of JUUL, the top-selling e-cigarette brand of the past five years. When JUUL appealed the decision, the FDA put the denial order on hold until additional review was completed, which is expected to take several months.

And JUUL isn't the only e-cigarette under threat of a ban. Of the millions of e-cigarette applications submitted to the FDA by the September 2020 deadline, more than 99% were rejected.

E-cigarette bans are puzzling and counterintuitive against the backdrop of the FDA's plans to drastically reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes and cigars. Leading researchers agree that having a variety of legal, regulated high-nicotine e-cigarettes on the market is a key factor in reducing consumer demand for illicit high-nicotine vaping products.

Health authorities in other parts of the world, including the UK and New Zealand, also recognise the important role e-cigarettes can play in reducing smoking. Therefore, New Zealand's nicotine reduction plan explicitly includes the provision of alternative nicotine products such as e-cigarettes.

Studies have shown that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than cigarettes and have been shown to help smokers transition from highly toxic cigarettes. Therefore, to protect public health, it may well be appropriate to keep various e-cigarette brands on the market until successful implementation of cigarette nicotine reduction programs.

In my opinion, imposing nicotine reduction standards on combustible tobacco represents the possibility of finally ending cigarette addiction in our lifetime.