The Former FDA Chief Says the White House Wanted More Vapes. Believe the Pattern, Not the Feud.

On Tuesday, the man who ran the Food and Drug Administration until May told POLITICO what he says he was up against. “A lot of pressure from White House and HHS aides was not on medical cures or healthy food,” Marty Makary said, but on getting more vapes approved and keeping lobbyists happy. “Americans don’t want their kids smoking strawberry banana vapes.” The White House did not respond to POLITICO; a spokesperson told another outlet that the only special interest guiding the president is the American people.

Ignore the personalities. The record already says what Makary is saying.

Nicotine policy this year has moved in one direction, and it isn’t toward fewer products. On May 5 the FDA authorized four Glas e-liquid pods, including mango and blueberry, the first e-cigarettes ever cleared in flavors other than tobacco and menthol, after internal memos showed a senior official reporting to Makary had blocked them in February. Makary resigned a week later; the agency’s top spokesperson resigned the next day, blaming unnamed senior HHS officials. On October 30 the FDA authorized 24 more Velo nicotine pouches, bringing the total to 67. A former HHS adviser has publicly tied the shift to lobbyists; the people he named deny it.

There is an honest scientific argument underneath all this, and it deserves a hearing. For an adult who smokes, switching completely to a vape or pouch is very likely less harmful than cigarettes, and flavors may help some adults switch. The same FDA memo that blocked the mango pod found no meaningful difference in adult switching between the flavored and tobacco-flavored versions, which cuts against the idea that fruit flavors were essential. That’s the tradeoff regulators are supposed to weigh, in public, on evidence. What Makary describes is the weighing being done somewhere else.

If you quit nicotine, or are trying to, you already know this isn’t abstract. Nicotine is one of the hardest dependencies to break, and relapse after quitting other substances often comes with a vape in hand; the product on the gas-station counter is part of your environment whether you chose it or not. If you work in treatment, ask this week whether your intake screens for vaping and pouch use, not just smoking, and whether your program offers nicotine replacement or varenicline to people who want them. Most residential programs still treat nicotine as the one drug you’re allowed to keep. More on that in our nicotine and tobacco coverage.

The fight between Makary and the White House will be litigated by people with book deals. The kids who reach for a mango pod won’t be in the room.