Ban menthol in cigarettes
More than a year after candy, clove and fruit flavors were banned in cigarettes, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is weighing whether to do the same to menthol.
It’s easy to understand why the law that gave the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco also forbade so many types of flavored cigarettes. Studies show that they attract young people to smoking and keep them inhaling by disguising the otherwise harsh taste and sensation in the mouth and throat. But in that case, why didn’t the law also ban menthol, by far the most popular flavoring for cigarettes? Precisely because they’re so popular. Menthol brands account for about a quarter of U.S. cigarette sales; once people start with menthol, moreover, they are unlikely to switch to an unflavored brand. In other words, a ban on mentholated cigarettes has a good chance of cutting into smoking rates — and tobacco industry profits.
Menthol also is the preferred cigarette flavoring among African American smokers, and advertising has been specifically targeted to this demographic. Nearly three-fourths of African American smokers buy menthol brands.
In meetings last week, an FDA advisory committee heard about studies showing that advertisements for mentholated cigarettes were especially common in publications marketed to young people and on billboards in low-income communities. UC San Francisco researchers who had pored through industry documents said company surveys found that smokers wrongly perceived menthol cigarettes to be “light” and therefore less harmful, that they especially appealed to young people, and that the minty taste cools the harshness of cigarette smoke. Separately, a 2009 study found that smokers were able to quit regular cigarettes more easily than mentholated ones.
The FDA’s authority over cigarettes is more complicated than its other regulatory duties, just as our society’s attitude toward smoking is more divided than its view of, say, dangerous pharmaceuticals or unsafe food practices. Americans don’t particularly want a nanny state that tells its citizens whether they may or may not smoke, yet it is also clear that smoking is an addictive and dangerous habit with little to recommend it. If cigarettes were being proposed today as a new drug to treat stress, they would never pass FDA muster. But the law that gave the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco does not allow the agency to ban it. In the interests of public health, and especially to protect young people, it can prohibit certain additives — such as menthol — and can limit, but not ban, nicotine.
The tobacco industry points out that, as far as anyone knows, mentholated cigarettes are no worse for smokers’ health than regular cigarettes. That’s true, but the same is true of other flavored cigarettes. There is just as much reason — and more — to ban menthol as to ban cherry or chocolate flavoring in cigarettes.
Menthol cigarettes make it easier to get started on a health-wrecking habit, and harder to end it. The reason we have waited this long for a ban on mentholated cigarettes isn’t that menthol is inherently different from candy flavoring, but that it has been far more profitable for tobacco companies.
