Five years ago this week, we celebrated a landmark public health victory as the president signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law. After years of Big Tobacco's unfettered access to the public to peddle its deadly products, the FDA finally had the authority to regulate tobacco products.
Five years later we continue to celebrate this victory and the significant strides the FDA has already made to reduce tobacco use and the disease and death it causes. These actions include banning flavorings in cigarettes that can be attractive to youth, prohibiting the use of misleading claims such as mild and light and requiring tobacco companies to disclose to the FDA ingredients in their cigarettes. Some of these actions, along with our work to pass strong tobacco control laws, have helped to reduce youth cigarette smoking rates to an all-time low as the CDC reported last week. But our work is not done. The Surgeon General found that smoking still kills 480,000 Americans each year, sickens millions more and costs the nation at least $289 billion in health care bills and other economic losses each year. The FDA and the Obama Administration must take even stronger and bolder action to accelerate progress in reducing tobacco use and ultimately ending the tobacco epidemic. That's why we've joined with five other public health organizations to call on the FDA and the Administration to urgently take three priority actions:
As Dr. Seffrin said in his video, this is one of the most important laws we've seen in our nation's war on cancer. I hope that the FDA and the Administration will work expeditiously to take these actions so we're well on our way to creating a tobacco-free generation and ending the tobacco epidemic for good.
Today’s blog is one of a series of posts highlighting how ACS CAN is examining, prioritizing and pursuing policy interventions that ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to prevent, find, treat and survive cancer. Achieving health equity in communities nationwide is a cornerstone of our mission.