Yesterday President Obama announced he is going to support the Tobacco bill (details by AP). Ironically the President was (is?) a smoker himself.
This is a good thing, right? Put Cigarettes in the hands of FDA will streamline the regulations, and hopefully fewer young people will smoke the cigarettes in the future. But wait a minute, until I heard a real interesting point from a caller at NPR (Diane Rhem show), the caller is saying: what if the FDA asks the cigarette makers to reduce the nicotine content by half, because he can not cut his nicotine consumption due to the addictive nature of nicotine, he will buy and smoke twice as much. In other words, he will spend twice as much on smoking (assume the price of one pack of cigarettes does not change); on the other hand cigarette makers will increased sales (and profitability) this way.
No wonder the major cigarette makers such as Philip Morris supported the bill.