This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 23rd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Biden administration is looking seriously at compelling cigarette manufacturers

to lower nicotine content in cigarettes to non-addictive levels.

This holds, of course, high potential to create a massive black market for nicotine products.

Cato's Jeff Singer and Tom Fiery comment on what backdoor prohibition of addictive cigarettes

would accomplish.

This seems fairly straightforward, and yet there seems to be not enough talk about how

devastatingly bad this decision could be.

Tom if you wouldn't mind, walk us through the economics of trying to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes.

I would assume that when you try to take away something that people want or to dramatically reduce what they want,

they are going to respond by finding a way to get more of it whether legally or illegally.

If you think of the New York City soda ban of or or not ban but limitation on the size of cups of soda or of soda or bottles of soda that we had there a few years ago and people just simply compensated by buying two cups of soda instead of one or two bottles of soda instead of one, you know, it strikes me that the same thing is going to happen here if people want X amount of nicotine, if they want to feel a nicotine buzz, and's face it one of the main reasons people smoke

cigarettes if not the main reason is for the nicotine and you reduce the nicotine they're just going to smoke a few more cigarettes.

And the problem with cigarettes, and we'll let, you know, Jeff handle the medical because

he's the one with a fancy degree, but, you know, my simple medical knowledge is, you know,

nicotine is not nearly as bad as a lot of the other stuff in cigarettes.

So if you're going to have people

suddenly smoking two or three times as many,

you're actually going to end up with a lot more problems

than you had before you made this government intervention.

Jeff, nicotine may be one of the most studied chemicals on the planet.

...