Guest Editorial: What a Former FDA Insider Gets Wrong About Vaping
I met David Oliveira last year at an industry conference, just as he was wrapping up a six-year run in leadership at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. In our conversation, he struck me as more pragmatic than most of his colleagues. So when Fox News Digital published a video interview with him last week framing him as an FDA “whistleblower,” I was curious to hear what he had to say.
To his credit, Oliveira gets some important things right. He calls out the mismanagement under Brian King, the agency’s now-former tobacco chief. He criticizes the FDA’s fixation on optics over outcomes, especially how DEI initiatives crowded out core public health missions. And he makes a cogent point about the Biden Administration’s proposed menthol cigarette ban, calling it a “paternalistic” policy that would push people to the black market. “It failed,” he said bluntly, because “you’re just setting our people up to have to buy and sell in an illicit marketplace.”
Yet when it comes to vaping, Oliveira seems eager to champion that very result. He laments that the FDA didn’t heed his call for aggressive enforcement against flavored disposables. He wanted to see “boots on the ground … city by city, state by state,” targeting vape shops selling unauthorized products. He singles out Chinese manufacturers, pausing to drop in scare-terms for product flavors with microscopic market shares, like Blow Pop and gummy bear.
"Had the FDA followed Oliveira’s advice and swept vape shops with enforcement raids, millions of adults would have lost access to the tools they were using to stay off cigarettes."
What Oliveira doesn’t confront is how the illicit vape market emerged in the first place. As nicotine policy expert Clive Bates has outlined, it wasn’t the product of bad actors; it was created by regulatory collapse. The FDA received more than 26 million product applications and has authorized just 34 products.
Think about that: in a country with over 15 million adult vapers, the agency approved barely three dozen products—nearly all tobacco-flavored, and all made by the same cigarette companies the FDA claims to be regulating.
Meanwhile, hundreds of independent American businesses submitted premarket tobacco applications (PMTAs) in good faith, in some cases investing their life savings. Most were met with form-letter rejections or perfunctory denials. When the FDA effectively banned nearly every flavored product made in the United States, adult consumers were left with two options: go back to smoking or switch to disposable vapes manufactured overseas—the only products still capable of meeting demand. That’s the reality Oliveira sidesteps.
Had the FDA followed Oliveira’s advice and swept vape shops with enforcement raids, millions of adults would have lost access to the tools they were using to stay off cigarettes. The result wouldn’t have been better public health. It would’ve been mass relapse—and a regulatory windfall for Big Tobacco.
"Adults overwhelmingly prefer fruit and dessert flavors because they make smoking less appealing. But rather than build a rule-based system that reflects that reality, FDA has weaponized ambiguity to deny nearly every application."
The timing of Oliveira’s critique also warrants attention. Since leaving the agency, he has joined a consulting firm specializing in government relations and FDA regulatory affairs. That doesn’t invalidate his views, but it does put them in context. His preferred policy outcomes align neatly with the limited slice of the market the FDA has chosen to preserve: tobacco and menthol flavors produced by companies wealthy enough to navigate the agency’s broken approval system. (Asked on LinkedIn if his firm, Scrimshaw Strategies, has any tobacco industry clients, Oliveira read the message but did not respond.)
He gestures at the idea of allowing flavored products so long as they don’t “appeal to youth,” but never defines what that means—or how a company might prove it. Are we regulating by flavor or by vibe? Because if it’s the latter, no one—consumer or manufacturer—can be sure what’s allowed. Adults overwhelmingly prefer fruit and dessert flavors because they make smoking less appealing. But rather than build a rule-based system that reflects that reality, FDA has weaponized ambiguity to deny nearly every application. More than most, Oliveira should understand this era of name-based regulation has to end, but he offers no path forward.
Most telling is that Oliveira clearly understands what’s at stake. He speaks movingly about reducing smoking and saving lives. But by endorsing a crackdown-first strategy before fixing the FDA’s product review system, he risks entrenching the same failures that made this market chaotic in the first place. Higher-nicotine disposables became popular because they worked—they’re satisfying, affordable and simple.
The answer isn’t prohibition by paperwork or policing vape shops at the barrel of a gun. It’s reforming the review process, authorizing safer products at scale, implementing post-market surveillance, and recognizing that flavors matter. You don’t help people by banning what already works. You help them by making quitting cigarettes easier and safer. That’s the mission. Everything else is noise—and people die because of it.
Gregory Conley
Vaping for: 15 years
Favorite products:
Favorite flavors: Mango, melon
Expertise in: Legislative affairs and policy
