On Tuesday, the FDA finally stood up to the Tobacco industry. Four years ago, President Obama signed a tobacco bill granting the FDA authority to exercise its power to regulate cigarettes and other tobacco products.
Under the law, the F.D.A. is able to set product standards and ban some chemicals in tobacco products, but not totally ban addictive nicotine. The F.D.A. also set up a new tobacco regulatory office financed by industry fees, which totaled $85 million in the first year and as much as $700 million annually within 10 years.
The F.D.A. has had the power not only to consider changing existing products, but also to ban new products unless the agency found they contributed to overall public health.
Exercising this power, the FDA has allowed two products to be sold - metholated versions of Newport cigarettes - and rejected four others. According to the LA Times "Science Now" blog, "those products, which the FDA is legally forbidden to identify, raised questions of public health that have not been substantially answered by studies of existing products."
The FDA has stated it will continue to allow more products if they are similar enough to ones already on the market.
Abortion, again?
Delaware, North Dakota and Texas all made headlines this week for their abortion law efforts:
Delaware: In a unanimous vote, the Delaware Senate aproved a bill (discussed here last Friday) that more tightly regulates abortion clinics. The measure will now go the House.
North Dakota: On Tuesday, a women's rights group filed a lawsuit in Federal court to bock a North Dakota ban on abortions. The ban makes illegal abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy, a law the New York Times calls "the country's most stringest abortion law." The law, enacted in March, forbids abortions once a fetal heartbeat is "detectable." This can be as early as six weeks and even before many pepole know they are pregnant. The complaint states that the law seeks "to interfere directly in personal, private medical decisions that the Constitution and more than 40 years of US Supreme Court precedent guarantee to women as a fundamental right."
Texas: After the widely publicized and acclaimed fillabuster by Wendy Davis, a Democratic senator, Texas Governor Rick Perry called the state legislature back in session July 1 to give state lawmakers another chance to pass a measure that may close most of the state's abortion clinics.
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