Josh Sharfstein is the Deputy Commissioner of the FDA in charge of its drug office that issued the notice adding e-cigarettes to Custom's import restriction list, that has overseen all enforcement actions against e-cigarettes, and that refuses to classify and regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products.
Sharfstein also organized and ran the FDA's July 22, 2009 press conference where he knowingly and intentionally misrepresented the evidence about e-cigarettes. One of the so-called public health experts who Sharfstein brought in to trash e-cigarettes at the press conference was Jonathan Samet, who was recently rewarded for his e-cigarette demonization and prohibition activism by being named Chair of the FDA tobacco scientific advisory committee.
From 2003 to 2007, Sharfstein was Henry Waxman's legislative staffer whose responsibility was to lobby other members of Congress to enact the FDA tobacco legislation (after Waxman and Sharfstein were involved in negotiation and agreeing to the legislation with Philip Morris).
Sharfstein is an abstinence-only tobacco/nicotine prohibitionist who has gone to great lengths since 2003 to mislead the public to inaccurately believe that all tobacco/nicotine products (except NRT products marketed as smoking cessation aids) are similarly hazardous, to mislead the public to believe that smokefree tobacco products are being target marketed to youth (instead of to adult smokers), and to oppose every effort to amend the FDA tobacco legislation to thruthfully inform the public that smokefree tobacco/nicotine products are 99% less hazardous alternatives to cigarettes.
