The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is advancing a regulatory rule in the final days of the Biden administration that would effectively ban cigarettes currently available on the market in favor of products with lower nicotine levels.

However, an expert told Fox News Digital that this could inadvertently boost business for cartels operating on the black market.

“Biden’s ban is a gift with a bow and balloons to organized crime cartels with it, whether it’s cartels, Chinese organized crime, or Russian mafia. It’s going to keep America smoking, and it’s going to make the streets more violent,” Rich Marianos, former assistant director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the current chair of the Tobacco Law Enforcement Network, told Fox News Digital of the proposal. 

The FDA confirmed to Fox News on Monday that as of January 3, the Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Levels in Certain Tobacco Products had completed its regulatory review, but the proposed rule has not yet been finalized.

“The proposed rule, ‘Tobacco Product Standard for Nicotine Level of Certain Tobacco Products,’ is displaying in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) ROCIS system as having completed regulatory review on January 3,” an FDA spokesman told Fox.

“As the FDA has previously said, a proposed product standard to establish a maximum nicotine level to reduce the addictiveness of cigarettes and certain other combusted tobacco products, when finalized, is estimated to be among the most impactful population-level actions in the history of U.S. tobacco product regulation. At this time, the FDA cannot provide any further comment until it is published,” the agency noted further.

Former President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009, giving the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco products.

Since then, the agency has worked to reduce nicotine levels, including in July 2017 under the Trump administration, when then-FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced plans to require tobacco companies to significantly lower nicotine in cigarettes to help adult smokers kick the habit.