It has taken what feels like an eternity for the American Food and Drug Administration to make the recent announcement that it wants to slash the level of nicotine in cigarettes to make them less addictive and easier to quit. From the days of the 1964 surgeon general’s warning that smoking was dangerous and a major cause of cancer - save for anti-smoking ads in the media, warnings slapped on cigarette packs, and the setting up of no smoking public zones – precious little has been done to help the smoking public quit.

In the US, the major cause of preventable deaths as well as diseases is tobacco. To be sure, nicotine is not what kills the hundreds of thousands of people each year. It’s the other chemical compounds when the tobacco is lit. The FDA plan is expected to serve as a roadmap that can be implemented through multiple years in improving the protection of children as well as reducing the diseases and deaths related to tobacco.

It is also tacit admission by the FDA that almost nothing has helped Americans stop smoking, including the plethora of statistics, no matter how frightening. The fact that tobacco use remains the leading cause of death in America, causing more than 480,000 deaths every single year, causes hardly a ripple among those who smoke. They also probably could not care less that cigarettes are the “only legal consumer product that, when used as intended, will kill half of all long-term users,” the FDA commissioner said in a statement.

Naturally, stock market shares of tobacco plummeted after the plan was announced. Shares of major tobacco companies in the US and UK slumped in heavy trading volume after the proposal was unveiled by the FDA, with the world’s biggest producers losing about $26 billion of market value. What would this mean for the companies affected? Non-addictive levels of nicotine would likely mean a lot fewer smokers and of those people who do still light up, smoking a lot less.

Most big tobacco makers have long seen the writing on the wall and have invested in e-cigarettes and other alternative nicotine delivery systems.

Those steps could potentially mitigate the blow from any decline in cigarette sales; however, the FDA is not concerned about whatever losses cigarette companies incur from its plan. The FDA is directly concerned with tobacco affecting society with a huge financial cost, via direct health care and lost productivity, which together cost the US approximately $300 billion a year. Currently, 5.6 million young Americans who use tobacco will die prematurely later on in life as a result of their habit; in the US, each day approximately 2,500 young people smoke their first cigarette and almost 90 percent of adult smokers started smoking before the age of 18.

It is anticipated that regulators in Europe will study similar actions on nicotine products. The real gain is if this plan stretches to the Third World where smoking is one of the biggest public health threats the developing world has ever faced.

The FDA cannot reduce nicotine levels to zero, nor can it ban cigarettes. Consequently, it has gone to the next best thing: starting the process of seeking to lower nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels.

More than 50 years after the 1964 surgeon general’s warning, the report that the FDA is now planning to regulate nicotine levels to help counter the enormous impact of addiction is headline news.