Brownstone Institute
Are 15-Minute Cities Smart?
From the Brownstone Institute
The 15-minute city (FMC) – a neat idea, a new way to control the populace, a trendy blip in the public planning industry, a long-term insidious scheme – all, some, or none of these?
If you have questions about the concept, here is what you are already being called.
As with the gas stove “debate,” any questioning of the latest coolest way to reorganize society is a sign of madness. This haughty reality-shifting attitude somehow pervades the elites despite the deserved devastation of the public’s trust in its institutions in the wake of the pandemic, the response to which involved lies, half-truths, spin, lies, mistakes, lies, the threat of force, lies, the threat of unemployment, the ordered home confinement, the mass destruction of small businesses, and lies.
All of that should be a bit of a tip-off as to the true intentions of the supporters of the idea, but, that being said, let’s discuss the basics.
The idea essentially is to reinvent the neighborhood idea by trying to ensure that pretty much all of the goods and services a person could ever want are readily available nearby. Jobs, schools, doctors, and cultural activities are also meant to be easily accessible. To get to the “15-minute” part, the area would be (based on typical walking speeds) about a square mile or so.
At its heart, the idea harkens back to the village of yore – a place of belonging, simplicity, of knowing your neighbors, of creating a community you can count on in a pinch.
While this may be a key selling point, it cannot be forgotten that for literally hundreds of years people have been purposefully leaving villages to try their hand in the city with its chaos and opportunity, its risks and rewards, and, most importantly, its broadening experiences.
Cities of course already have neighborhoods that are somewhat similar to FMCs, but they tend to be organized around an activity – a meat-packing district, the financial hub, etc. – an ethnicity – Little Italy, Chinatown (sorry, Seattle, I mean the International District,) a socio-economic cluster – the westside of Los Angeles versus the eastside of Los Angeles, or even an entertainment activity – Broadway in New York or edgy, anything goes red-light districts like the Tenderloin in San Francisco (NOTE – defining what is happening in the Tenderloin now as entertaining is admittedly a stretch, but before the current stumbling nightmare it was for decades a “rough trade” pleasure zone and one supposes that’s a form of entertainment.)
The idea of the FMC, however, is to eventually smooth these differences and create zone after zone of similarly homogeneous neighborhoods throughout a city. As equity is one of the hallmarks of the concept, it might not be terribly fair to have one FMC be notably richer than another, notably different from any of the others.
How to implement an FMC – short of the bulldozer, anyway – is rather complicated because people tend to already be in places targeted for such modification. Zoning, government incentives, planning regulations, public enticements, or simple declarations by fiat have all been proposed to mold existing neighborhoods into FMCs.
In other words, even proponents know that they will not occur organically and need significant government intervention to even get off the ground (another tip-off as to the true intent behind the push.)
One of the most important aspects is the elimination of the necessity of a personal vehicle. If practically everything a person needs is so close – literally within walking distance – and if everything else that doesn’t fit – stadium, airport, university, massive hospital and/or museum, etc. – can be easily traveled to by public transit, then do you need an evil, polluting, selfish mobility device? When FMC ideas are rolled out, they do tend to have rather limited parking options – on purpose – as another “benefit” of them is that they are supposed to be better for the environment, more sustainable, more equitable, more whatever woke/equitarian buzzword of the moment you want to use.
Now on to smart cities.
This is a bit simpler because pretty much everything about FMCs applies except with the added bonus that your neighborhood is watching you at all times. Using cell phone tracking, defined shopping habits, health information from your smartwatch, your social media presence, your credit report, you familial status, your hobbies, your habits, and your opinions, a smart city will figure out everything you need even before you know you need it and encourage you to be an overall better person as it defines better people.
In other words, the definition of a needs-taken-care-of, stay-in-your-house-and-shut-up-or-we-will-take-that-away-from-you Nerfified mere existence. You know, hell with ice water.
Not every FMC is a smart city, but most smart cities must be (or at least start out as) an FMC.
Smart cities are currently so controversial that even Toronto – central driver of the Great Woke North – abandoned the idea .
But the smart city has its supporters and projects are underway building them from the ground up, bypassing the need to shoehorn the debilitatingly intrusive, soul-crushing tech into places that already exist. Here’s a somewhat jaundiced look at the giant mirrored line city Neom – – a bit more, um, hopeful look at other smart city projects underway. (NOTE – I chose videos for those links because they really have to be seen to be believed.)
And one of the advantages – or hallucinatory disturbing problem – of the FMC is that it is extremely convertible – once established – into a smart city.
It should be noted that Vehicle Miles Traveled taxes, low-emission zones, and other anti-individual freedom measures can also be used to set the stage for an incremental move to FMC and/or smart cities. That could be why protests broke out – and why foundations and governments and much of the media is calling the protesters right-wing conspiracy theorists and just plain wrong and that such schemes are not at all part of any attempt to modify personal behavior though oppressive regulation (another tip-off.)
In Oxford, England, protestors were told neighborhood travel cordons had nothing to do with the completely separate, no way at all tied together, FMC studies proposed at the same time; especially post-pandemic, with the lies and cudgels and censorship and confinements and lies – people are rightfully calling “bullshit” on such facile pronouncements, hence the tension.
But how would a big, diverse in the true sense of the word, city like Los Angeles, for example, be FMCed?
Going a step further than Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) – an existing government-funded trend to get people to live near bus lines and train stations – LA activists are pushing things like the VMT pilot program, dropping parking requirements, and incentivizing smaller, presumably rental (you will own nothing and like it) dwelling units to shoehorn the idea into existing neighborhoods.
Here are just a few of the benefits of FMC (lite?) being touted by the Livable Communities Initiative, a near-parody of an LA do-goodery factory:
- Benefit nearby homeowners and residents with a beautiful walkable street, shops and cafes, and access to transit and bike lanes
- Give every Angeleno the option of an affordable home without the $8,000/year cost and burden of a car
- Create attainable homeownership opportunities that can help close the racial wealth gap
- Reverse-engineer displacement by building in high-opportunity neighborhoods that have not built enough housing
- Address climate change by building car-light infill homes, 48 miles of transit-connected bike lanes, new bus lanes, and 48 miles of new tree canopy
“Building equitably and building near job centers reduces traffic,” LCI chief Jenny Hontz told the LAist. “So it makes life better for everyone and it helps the climate, too.” (Here’s the entire story; the comparison pics are worth the click )
In case you were wondering, the LCI partners with a bevy of the progressive foundational/movement suspects, from Extinction Rebellion to 15 Minute City to Young Entertainment Activists (again, another tip-off.)
Neighborhood and even city-specific plans are going to be rolled out by the LCI soon, though they already have “standard plans” that include such statements as “…human-scale, beautiful architecture above neighborhood serving retail. Imagine any of our historic main streets and villages – Westwood Village, Main Street and Abbot Kinney, Market St in Inglewood, NoHo Arts District, San Fernando Blvd in Burbank – with housing above the stores – creating small, affordable apartments for seniors, Gen Zers, people who don’t drive, and workers who are forced to spend 30% of their income on a car.”
LCI – as do basic FMC and smart city ideas – emphasize an imposed aesthetic as well – “But what if instead we could create streets with beautiful architecture – nourishing to the residents and the surrounding area? What if we intentionally designed our city? Cities all over the world pre-determine their architecture – it makes cities beautiful (Paris, Boston, Santa Barbara)”
LCI concepts, smart cities, and FMCs are oppressively top-down systems that shift power of one’s community to the bureaucrat class and intentionally and egregiously ignore same basic facts about how humans act and how a beautiful city like Boston – very very very much not by design – got to be that way.
The FMC movement goes beyond mere planning and architectural niceties. Even if they are not morphed into “smart cities,” certain other governmental agencies and societal elites have multiple reasons. FMCs would make it easier to establish specific community norms, norms that could be at odds with American notions like freedom of movement and speech.
FMCs could also play right into the hands of the forces that brought the world to its knees with their pandemic response. FMCs are not just looked at as making protocols like lockdowns and isolation far easier, they could even be sold as ways to “prevent” future pandemics.
In a 2020 Cell magazine article, Dr. Anthony Fauci – you remember him – cast at least partial blame for the most recent and past pandemics on how we as humans choose to live.
“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues,” Fauci and co-author David Mores wrote. “Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction?”
Another anathema of both smart cities and FMCs is that they need the resident to be the resource that drives them, that their consumer habits be mined and processed in order to make their existence feasible. They do not account for variety of thought or even the possibility of taking advantage of a unique local geographical or industrial or cultural benefit – they are mere consumption machines in which the human is the cog.
While natural neighborhoods can be wonderful supportive safe places, unnatural neighborhoods will exacerbate the problems that do occur in more tightly knit communities. Self-surveillance (if not actual real surveillance) and a sense of trepidation about leaving the comfortable confines can lead to a feeling of isolation from the larger world. In an FMC, that isolation could be seen as being not organic but ordered from on high, creating a mental box that can dwarf intellectual and emotional growth – in other words, a captive personality.
As we have seen from the Twitter Files and so many other recent (and not so recent) revelations about the Censorship-Industrial complex, the real danger of smart cities and FMCs is the potential for the elimination of freedoms, of options, of differences.
That’s not just censorship of thought, it’s censorship of life.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I recently purchased Aaron Siri’s new book Vaccines, Amen. As I flipped though the pages, I noticed a section devoted to his now-famous deposition of Dr Stanley Plotkin, the “godfather” of vaccines.
I’d seen viral clips circulating on social media, but I had never taken the time to read the full transcript — until now.
Siri’s interrogation was methodical and unflinching…a masterclass in extracting uncomfortable truths.
A Legal Showdown
In January 2018, Dr Stanley Plotkin, a towering figure in immunology and co-developer of the rubella vaccine, was deposed under oath in Pennsylvania by attorney Aaron Siri.
The case stemmed from a custody dispute in Michigan, where divorced parents disagreed over whether their daughter should be vaccinated. Plotkin had agreed to testify in support of vaccination on behalf of the father.
What followed over the next nine hours, captured in a 400-page transcript, was extraordinary.
Plotkin’s testimony revealed ethical blind spots, scientific hubris, and a troubling indifference to vaccine safety data.
He mocked religious objectors, defended experiments on mentally disabled children, and dismissed glaring weaknesses in vaccine surveillance systems.
A System Built on Conflicts
From the outset, Plotkin admitted to a web of industry entanglements.
He confirmed receiving payments from Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Pfizer, and several biotech firms. These were not occasional consultancies but long-standing financial relationships with the very manufacturers of the vaccines he promoted.
Plotkin appeared taken aback when Siri questioned his financial windfall from royalties on products like RotaTeq, and expressed surprise at the “tone” of the deposition.
Siri pressed on: “You didn’t anticipate that your financial dealings with those companies would be relevant?”
Plotkin replied: “I guess, no, I did not perceive that that was relevant to my opinion as to whether a child should receive vaccines.”
The man entrusted with shaping national vaccine policy had a direct financial stake in its expansion, yet he brushed it aside as irrelevant.
Contempt for Religious Dissent
Siri questioned Plotkin on his past statements, including one in which he described vaccine critics as “religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease.”
Siri asked whether he stood by that statement. Plotkin replied emphatically, “I absolutely do.”
Plotkin was not interested in ethical pluralism or accommodating divergent moral frameworks. For him, public health was a war, and religious objectors were the enemy.
He also admitted to using human foetal cells in vaccine production — specifically WI-38, a cell line derived from an aborted foetus at three months’ gestation.
Siri asked if Plotkin had authored papers involving dozens of abortions for tissue collection. Plotkin shrugged: “I don’t remember the exact number…but quite a few.”
Plotkin regarded this as a scientific necessity, though for many people — including Catholics and Orthodox Jews — it remains a profound moral concern.
Rather than acknowledging such sensitivities, Plotkin dismissed them outright, rejecting the idea that faith-based values should influence public health policy.
That kind of absolutism, where scientific aims override moral boundaries, has since drawn criticism from ethicists and public health leaders alike.
As NIH director Jay Bhattacharya later observed during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, such absolutism erodes trust.
“In public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody,” he said. “Having alternatives that are not ethically conflicted with foetal cell lines is not just an ethical issue — it’s a public health issue.”
Safety Assumed, Not Proven
When the discussion turned to safety, Siri asked, “Are you aware of any study that compares vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children?”
Plotkin replied that he was “not aware of well-controlled studies.”
Asked why no placebo-controlled trials had been conducted on routine childhood vaccines such as hepatitis B, Plotkin said such trials would be “ethically difficult.”
That rationale, Siri noted, creates a scientific blind spot. If trials are deemed too unethical to conduct, then gold-standard safety data — the kind required for other pharmaceuticals — simply do not exist for the full childhood vaccine schedule.
Siri pointed to one example: Merck’s hepatitis B vaccine, administered to newborns. The company had only monitored participants for adverse events for five days after injection.
Plotkin didn’t dispute it. “Five days is certainly short for follow-up,” he admitted, but claimed that “most serious events” would occur within that time frame.
Siri challenged the idea that such a narrow window could capture meaningful safety data — especially when autoimmune or neurodevelopmental effects could take weeks or months to emerge.
Siri pushed on. He asked Plotkin if the DTaP and Tdap vaccines — for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — could cause autism.
“I feel confident they do not,” Plotkin replied.
But when shown the Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report, which found the evidence “inadequate to accept or reject” a causal link between DTaP and autism, Plotkin countered, “Yes, but the point is that there were no studies showing that it does cause autism.”
In that moment, Plotkin embraced a fallacy: treating the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
“You’re making assumptions, Dr Plotkin,” Siri challenged. “It would be a bit premature to make the unequivocal, sweeping statement that vaccines do not cause autism, correct?”
Plotkin relented. “As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.”
The MMR
The deposition also exposed the fragile foundations of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
When Siri asked for evidence of randomised, placebo-controlled trials conducted before MMR’s licensing, Plotkin pushed back: “To say that it hasn’t been tested is absolute nonsense,” he said, claiming it had been studied “extensively.”
Pressed to cite a specific trial, Plotkin couldn’t name one. Instead, he gestured to his own 1,800-page textbook: “You can find them in this book, if you wish.”
Siri replied that he wanted an actual peer-reviewed study, not a reference to Plotkin’s own book. “So you’re not willing to provide them?” he asked. “You want us to just take your word for it?”
Plotkin became visibly frustrated.
Eventually, he conceded there wasn’t a single randomised, placebo-controlled trial. “I don’t remember there being a control group for the studies, I’m recalling,” he said.
The exchange foreshadowed a broader shift in public discourse, highlighting long-standing concerns that some combination vaccines were effectively grandfathered into the schedule without adequate safety testing.
In September this year, President Trump called for the MMR vaccine to be broken up into three separate injections.
The proposal echoed a view that Andrew Wakefield had voiced decades earlier — namely, that combining all three viruses into a single shot might pose greater risk than spacing them out.
Wakefield was vilified and struck from the medical register. But now, that same question — once branded as dangerous misinformation — is set to be re-examined by the CDC’s new vaccine advisory committee, chaired by Martin Kulldorff.
The Aluminium Adjuvant Blind Spot
Siri next turned to aluminium adjuvants — the immune-activating agents used in many childhood vaccines.
When asked whether studies had compared animals injected with aluminium to those given saline, Plotkin conceded that research on their safety was limited.
Siri pressed further, asking if aluminium injected into the body could travel to the brain. Plotkin replied, “I have not seen such studies, no, or not read such studies.”
When presented with a series of papers showing that aluminium can migrate to the brain, Plotkin admitted he had not studied the issue himself, acknowledging that there were experiments “suggesting that that is possible.”
Asked whether aluminium might disrupt neurological development in children, Plotkin stated, “I’m not aware that there is evidence that aluminum disrupts the developmental processes in susceptible children.”
Taken together, these exchanges revealed a striking gap in the evidence base.
Compounds such as aluminium hydroxide and aluminium phosphate have been injected into babies for decades, yet no rigorous studies have ever evaluated their neurotoxicity against an inert placebo.
This issue returned to the spotlight in September 2025, when President Trump pledged to remove aluminium from vaccines, and world-leading researcher Dr Christopher Exley renewed calls for its complete reassessment.
A Broken Safety Net
Siri then turned to the reliability of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — the primary mechanism for collecting reports of vaccine-related injuries in the United States.
Did Plotkin believe most adverse events were captured in this database?
“I think…probably most are reported,” he replied.
But Siri showed him a government-commissioned study by Harvard Pilgrim, which found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to VAERS.
“Yes,” Plotkin said, backtracking. “I don’t really put much faith into the VAERS system…”
Yet this is the same database officials routinely cite to claim that “vaccines are safe.”
Ironically, Plotkin himself recently co-authored a provocative editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, conceding that vaccine safety monitoring remains grossly “inadequate.”
Experimenting on the Vulnerable
Perhaps the most chilling part of the deposition concerned Plotkin’s history of human experimentation.
“Have you ever used orphans to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“Yes,” Plotkin replied.
“Have you ever used the mentally handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“I don’t recollect…I wouldn’t deny that I may have done so,” Plotkin replied.
Siri cited a study conducted by Plotkin in which he had administered experimental rubella vaccines to institutionalised children who were “mentally retarded.”
Plotkin stated flippantly, “Okay well, in that case…that’s what I did.”
There was no apology, no sign of ethical reflection — just matter-of-fact acceptance.
Siri wasn’t done.
He asked if Plotkin had argued that it was better to test on those “who are human in form but not in social potential” rather than on healthy children.
Plotkin admitted to writing it.
Siri established that Plotkin had also conducted vaccine research on the babies of imprisoned mothers, and on colonised African populations.
Plotkin appeared to suggest that the scientific value of such studies outweighed the ethical lapses—an attitude that many would interpret as the classic ‘ends justify the means’ rationale.
But that logic fails the most basic test of informed consent. Siri asked whether consent had been obtained in these cases.
“I don’t remember…but I assume it was,” Plotkin said.
Assume?
This was post-Nuremberg research. And the leading vaccine developer in America couldn’t say for sure whether he had properly informed the people he experimented on.
In any other field of medicine, such lapses would be disqualifying.
A Casual Dismissal of Parental Rights
Plotkin’s indifference to experimenting on disabled children didn’t stop there.
Siri asked whether someone who declined a vaccine due to concerns about missing safety data should be labelled “anti-vax.”
Plotkin replied, “If they refused to be vaccinated themselves or refused to have their children vaccinated, I would call them an anti-vaccination person, yes.”
Plotkin was less concerned about adults making that choice for themselves, but he had no tolerance for parents making those choices for their own children.
“The situation for children is quite different,” said Plotkin, “because one is making a decision for somebody else and also making a decision that has important implications for public health.”
In Plotkin’s view, the state held greater authority than parents over a child’s medical decisions — even when the science was uncertain.
The Enabling of Figures Like Plotkin
The Plotkin deposition stands as a case study in how conflicts of interest, ideology, and deference to authority have corroded the scientific foundations of public health.
Plotkin is no fringe figure. He is celebrated, honoured, and revered. Yet he promotes vaccines that have never undergone true placebo-controlled testing, shrugs off the failures of post-market surveillance, and admits to experimenting on vulnerable populations.
This is not conjecture or conspiracy — it is sworn testimony from the man who helped build the modern vaccine program.
Now, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reopens long-dismissed questions about aluminium adjuvants and the absence of long-term safety studies, Plotkin’s once-untouchable legacy is beginning to fray.
Republished from the author’s Substack
From the Brownstone Institute
A walk through a dozen convenience stores in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says a lot about how US nicotine policy actually works. Only about one in eight nicotine-pouch products for sale is legal. The rest are unauthorized—but they’re not all the same. Some are brightly branded, with uncertain ingredients, not approved by any Western regulator, and clearly aimed at impulse buyers. Others—like Sweden’s NOAT—are the opposite: muted, well-made, adult-oriented, and already approved for sale in Europe.
Yet in the United States, NOAT has been told to stop selling. In September 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the company a warning letter for offering nicotine pouches without marketing authorization. That might make sense if the products were dangerous, but they appear to be among the safest on the market: mild flavors, low nicotine levels, and recyclable paper packaging. In Europe, regulators consider them acceptable. In America, they’re banned. The decision looks, at best, strange—and possibly arbitrary.
What the Market Shows
My October 2025 audit was straightforward. I visited twelve stores and recorded every distinct pouch product visible for sale at the counter. If the item matched one of the twenty ZYN products that the FDA authorized in January, it was counted as legal. Everything else was counted as illegal.
Two of the stores told me they had recently received FDA letters and had already removed most illegal stock. The other ten stores were still dominated by unauthorized products—more than 93 percent of what was on display. Across all twelve locations, about 12 percent of products were legal ZYN, and about 88 percent were not.
The illegal share wasn’t uniform. Many of the unauthorized products were clearly high-nicotine imports with flashy names like Loop, Velo, and Zimo. These products may be fine, but some are probably high in contaminants, and a few often with very high nicotine levels. Others were subdued, plainly meant for adult users. NOAT was a good example of that second group: simple packaging, oat-based filler, restrained flavoring, and branding that makes no effort to look “cool.” It’s the kind of product any regulator serious about harm reduction would welcome.
Enforcement Works
To the FDA’s credit, enforcement does make a difference. The two stores that received official letters quickly pulled their illegal stock. That mirrors the agency’s broader efforts this year: new import alerts to detain unauthorized tobacco products at the border (see also Import Alert 98-06), and hundreds of warning letters to retailers, importers, and distributors.
But effective enforcement can’t solve a supply problem. The list of legal nicotine-pouch products is still extremely short—only a narrow range of ZYN items. Adults who want more variety, or stores that want to meet that demand, inevitably turn to gray-market suppliers. The more limited the legal catalog, the more the illegal market thrives.
Why the NOAT Decision Appears Bizarre
The FDA’s own actions make the situation hard to explain. In January 2025, it authorized twenty ZYN products after finding that they contained far fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes and could help adult smokers switch. That was progress. But nine months later, the FDA has approved nothing else—while sending a warning letter to NOAT, arguably the least youth-oriented pouch line in the world.
The outcome is bad for legal sellers and public health. ZYN is legal; a handful of clearly risky, high-nicotine imports continue to circulate; and a mild, adult-market brand that meets European safety and labeling rules is banned. Officially, NOAT’s problem is procedural—it lacks a marketing order. But in practical terms, the FDA is punishing the very design choices it claims to value: simplicity, low appeal to minors, and clean ingredients.
This approach also ignores the differences in actual risk. Studies consistently show that nicotine pouches have far fewer toxins than cigarettes and far less variability than many vapes. The biggest pouch concerns are uneven nicotine levels and occasional traces of tobacco-specific nitrosamines, depending on manufacturing quality. The serious contamination issues—heavy metals and inconsistent dosage—belong mostly to disposable vapes, particularly the flood of unregulated imports from China. Treating all “unauthorized” products as equally bad blurs those distinctions and undermines proportional enforcement.
A Better Balance: Enforce Upstream, Widen the Legal Path
My small Montgomery County survey suggests a simple formula for improvement.
First, keep enforcement targeted and focused on suppliers, not just clerks. Warning letters clearly change behavior at the store level, but the biggest impact will come from auditing distributors and importers, and stopping bad shipments before they reach retail shelves.
Second, make compliance easy. A single-page list of authorized nicotine-pouch products—currently the twenty approved ZYN items—should be posted in every store and attached to distributor invoices. Point-of-sale systems can block barcodes for anything not on the list, and retailers could affirm, once a year, that they stock only approved items.
Third, widen the legal lane. The FDA launched a pilot program in September 2025 to speed review of new pouch applications. That program should spell out exactly what evidence is needed—chemical data, toxicology, nicotine release rates, and behavioral studies—and make timely decisions. If products like NOAT meet those standards, they should be authorized quickly. Legal competition among adult-oriented brands will crowd out the sketchy imports far faster than enforcement alone.
The Bottom Line
Enforcement matters, and the data show it works—where it happens. But the legal market is too narrow to protect consumers or encourage innovation. The current regime leaves a few ZYN products as lonely legal islands in a sea of gray-market pouches that range from sensible to reckless.
The FDA’s treatment of NOAT stands out as a case study in inconsistency: a quiet, adult-focused brand approved in Europe yet effectively banned in the US, while flashier and riskier options continue to slip through. That’s not a public-health victory; it’s a missed opportunity.
If the goal is to help adult smokers move to lower-risk products while keeping youth use low, the path forward is clear: enforce smartly, make compliance easy, and give good products a fair shot. Right now, we’re doing the first part well—but failing at the second and third. It’s time to fix that.
Author
Common Vaccines Linked to 38-50% Increased Risk of Dementia and Alzheimer’s
Trump DOJ seeks to quash Pfizer whistleblower’s lawsuit over COVID shots
Alberta introducing three “all-season resort areas” to provide more summer activities in Alberta’s mountain parks
The $50 Billion Question: EVs Never Delivered What Ottawa Promised
-
Community2 days agoCharitable giving on the decline in Canada
-
Business2 days agoCanada’s recent economic growth performance has been awful
-
Alberta2 days agoCanada’s New Green Deal
-
armed forces2 days agoOttawa’s Newly Released Defence Plan Crosses a Dangerous Line
-
Health1 day agoSaskatchewan woman approved for euthanasia urged to seek medical help in Canada rather than US
-
Alberta1 day agoAlberta’s huge oil sands reserves dwarf U.S. shale
-
Business2 days agoCOP30 finally admits what resource workers already knew: prosperity and lower emissions must go hand in hand
-
Health1 day agoCanadian gov’t considers sharing census data on gender-confused children