The Food and Drug Administration struck the wrong balance on its oversight of the e-cigarette industry, former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said at CNBC’s Healthy Returns conference Tuesday.
While commissioner, Gottlieb championed e-cigarettes as a way to help adults stop smoking. The agency’s delayed oversight has been blamed, in part, on a rise in teen vaping that Gottlieb eventually labeled as an “epidemic.”
One of his worst days as commissioner came last summer when he received data from the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey showing a spike in teens using e-cigarettes, he told CNBC’s Meg Tirrell at the conference.
