FDA tobacco product regulations: a powerful tool for tobacco control.

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Lawrence R. Deyton, MSPH, MDa The 2009 passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act launched the most far-reaching public health intervention in a generation.1 For the first time ever, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is fully authorized to use its regulatory authority to combat the nation's leading cause of preventable death: tobacco. However, FDA regulation is not only a powerful new tool to reduce tobacco-related disease and death, it also poses new opportunities and challenges to public health practitioners at every level of government, academia, research, and advocacy. It is difficult to overstate the human and economic cost of tobacco use in the