The public health groups currently suing the FDA over the agency’s suspiciously lenient new flavored e-cigarette policy are throwing a temper tantrum, and frankly, I find their lack of scientific curiosity disturbing. To the untrained eye, vaping executives bypassing the agency to lobby President Donald Trump directly with campaign donations might look like textbook corruption. But to a trained observer, it is simply a glorious display of natural selection. The FDA was an evolutionary bottleneck; the executives simply mutated a new, highly efficient pathway to the Oval Office.
I recently had the privilege of discussing this breakthrough over a multi-course lunch at Le Bernardin with several executives from the vaping industry, whose major companies have bravely already begun to prepare and ship new products despite the pending litigation. As we dissected a delicate sea bass, one executive laid out their methodology for the new flavor approvals. It was as rigorous and intellectually sound as any Nature paper I have ever peer-reviewed.
The traditional model of regulatory approval is sluggish, reliant on outdated metrics like "lung capacity" and "adolescent addiction rates." These executives, unburdened by dogma, proposed a bold new hypothesis: what if the most efficient mechanism for proving a product's safety was a seven-figure contribution to a political action committee?
In a very real sense, the flow of capital into a presidential campaign is indistinguishable from the flow of neurotransmitters across a synapse. It is an elegant transfer of energy seeking the path of least resistance. The public health groups suing the FDA fail to see this beauty. They are trapped in a Newtonian paradigm of linear cause and effect—where a chemical causes a disease, and a regulator stops it—while the vaping industry has ascended to the quantum realm, where a product is simultaneously banned and shipping nationwide until observed by a campaign finance disclosure.
The major companies involved have already begun to prepare and ship their new products nationwide, demonstrating a commendable commitment to rapid prototyping. While the FDA was busy demanding long-term toxicity reports on aerosolized fruit flavorings, the industry was already iterating on a new line of aggressively neon, mango-blasted nicotine salts. They recognized that the true test of a compound's viability is not whether it causes cellular degradation in a petri dish, but whether it can secure premium shelf space at a regional gas station before the litigation clears the appellate courts. This is the very essence of the agile scientific model.
We realized that waiting for long-term clinical trials was a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method, which clearly states that a hypothesis becomes a fact the moment the President plays a round of golf with your CEO.
Let us examine the sample size of this grand experiment. Traditional science restricts itself to tiny, non-representative cohorts in windowless basement labs at MIT. By bypassing the FDA entirely and shipping these new synthetic watermelon and blue-raspberry aerosols directly to the public, the industry has freed itself from these artificial constraints. They have turned the entire American middle school system into an open-air telescope array, gathering real-time, longitudinal data on adolescent neuroplasticity during third-period algebra. It is a breathtaking scale of research. Millions of subjects, completely unaware they are participating in a study, providing uncorrupted behavioral data on addiction pathways. It is the kind of ambitious, society-wide data collection that would make the architects of the Large Hadron Collider weep with envy.
When the executives realized the FDA was stubbornly resistant to their preliminary data regarding the absolute harmlessness of inhaling vaporized cotton-candy lipids at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, they did not abandon their research. They simply sought funding from a different grant committee. They pivoted to a more receptive receptor site: President Trump. The campaign donations were, in essence, an expedited grant application, submitted directly to the principal investigator of the United States.
Trump, serving as a highly reactive catalyst, accelerated the reaction perfectly. The donation was introduced into the system, lowering the activation energy required to dissolve a federal regulation. The resulting yield was a 100% pure, unfiltered policy shift. It is statistically significant. It is, frankly, reproducible. If a fossil fuel company were to replicate this exact methodology tomorrow, I am confident they would achieve the exact same regulatory decay.
This is what the public health groups, with their quaint reliance on "public safety," simply do not understand about the scientific method. If you do not like the results of your experiment, you must change your variables. The FDA was an exogenous variable that consistently yielded a negative outcome for quarterly profits. Therefore, the executives elegantly removed the FDA from the equation entirely and substituted the President. The math is flawless. It is a triumph of theoretical physics applied to the Washington bureaucracy.
We must stop coddling the American respiratory system. As Carl Sagan would say, we are made of star-stuff, and presumably, that star-stuff is highly resilient to aerosolized propylene glycol. The universe is a hostile, chaotic place, bombarding us with cosmic radiation and solar flares. A little bubblegum-flavored vapor is merely a gentle stress-test for our alveoli, preparing us for the rigors of an expanding cosmos.
To the FDA, I say: stand down. You have been out-innovated. Your models of longitudinal health studies are relics of the past. We are entering a new era of executive-branch empiricism, where the truth of a product's safety is directly proportional to the size of the check handed to the commander-in-chief.
The public health groups can file all the lawsuits they want, but they cannot halt the march of progress. The findings have been published, the products are on the trucks, and the lobbyists have already begun preparing their next grant proposal for a line of chewable nicotine gummies designed specifically for teething infants. I, for one, cannot wait to read the preprint.