The Biden administration is poised to try to lower the amount of nicotine in tobacco products, an eleventh-hour effort that’s been years in the making.

The move would give the White House one last chance to try to regulate tobacco, as it previously punted on finalizing a long-standing pledge to ban menthol-flavored cigarettes.

The rule has not been made public, so the specific language isn’t known, but it’s expected to require tobacco companies to slash the amount of nicotine in cigarettes and potentially other products to make them less addictive.

It could be published as early as Monday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), after it cleared regulatory review earlier this month.

But that would only begin a bureaucratic journey that anti-tobacco advocates worry an incoming Trump administration may derail.

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of disease, death and disability in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), killing more than 480,000 people each year. More than 16 million Americans are living with a smoking-related disease.

Most adults who smoke cigarettes want to quit, and half report trying to quit in the past year, according to a CDC survey from September. Yet less than 1 in 10 adults who smoke cigarettes succeed in quitting, drawn back in because of highly addictive nicotine that changes people’s brain chemistry so they want to smoke more.

“Lowering nicotine levels will help millions of people quit smoking and prevent countless others from becoming addicted, sparing families nationwide from........

© The Hill