Let’s ban all flavors of cigarettes
IT WAS a good first step by the Food and Drug Administration to ban candy- and fruit-flavored cigarettes this week under its new powers to regulate tobacco. The next and much bigger step is ending Menthol Madness.
As cancer-stick observers know, Big Tobacco really did not mind closing the candy store on cigarettes flavored like Hershey’s or Life Savers. They were not even one percent of the market. Menthol is by far the most prominent cigarette flavoring of all. But it was exempted from an immediate ban in the smoking-prevention act signed by President Obama in June.
The reason is simple: Menthol cigarettes are nearly 30 percent of the $87 billion US cigarette market. Menthol masks the harshness of smoking with its cooling effect and minty taste. The tobacco lobby and political allies bemoaned the impact of a menthol ban on jobs and government coffers. In 2007, tobacco sales generated $26 billion in state and federal tax revenues.
When Obama signed the prevention act, he proclaimed that the tobacco industry’s “millions upon millions in lobbying and advertising’’ on its “lies’’ to deny the deadly effects of smoking have “finally failed.’’
That is a lie as long as the menthol exemption exists. The exemption means that government coffers still remain more important than the coffins for the annual 443,000 lives lost to tobacco. The concern over tax revenues still overrides the $193 billion in annual health-related economic costs from smoking - a figure provided by the Centers for Disease Control.
The FDA can still ban menthol. Public health-minded politicians negotiated an explicit provision in the prevention act that commits the FDA to study menthol within one year. Any serious study should clearly result in a ban.
Medical journal studies over the last four years have found that smokers of menthol cigarettes are significantly more likely to have difficulty quitting smoking and that tobacco companies have deliberately manipulated menthol levels (as they did with nicotine) to lure younger smokers with “milder’’ taste. While menthol cigarettes are nearly 30 percent of the overall US market, 44 percent of smokers ages 12 to 17 reported smoking menthol brands.
The menthol exemption also leaves dangling in political midair explosive charges of racism. Menthol cigarettes are vastly disproportionately popular among African-Americans, with 80 percent of black smokers preferring menthol. According to the government, 30 percent of all cancer deaths are tied to cigarette smoking and African-Americans are 21 percent more likely to have lung cancer than white Americans. Smoking is tied to heart disease and strokes, and African-American men are twice as likely as white men to have strokes.
This was enough for seven former US health secretaries to protest the exemption. One of them, Joseph Califano, told The New York Times that the exemption was “clearly putting black children in the back of the bus.’’ This week, the American Legacy Foundation, established in the tobacco settlement with the states, urged the FDA to ban menthol along with the other flavors. “Literally many hundreds of tobacco industry documents conclusively establish that the tobacco industry has for decades systematically developed and marketed menthol products,’’ the foundation said, “. . . to lure youth and younger tobacco users by masking the harsh flavor.’’
But with at least a year to go before possible banning, Big Tobacco is systematically hooking as many new smokers as possible. Martin Orlowsky, the CEO of Lorillard, which makes the top-selling menthol Newport, said this month, “We will continue to leverage the very strong brand equity position Newport has, particularly in key markets where the opportunity - that is, menthol opportunity - is greatest.’’
As to where those “key markets’’ are, Reynolds American CEO Susan Ivey said in 2006, “If you look at the demographics of menthol, it is very urban. It has always had a strong African-American component. It’s always had actually a strong Caucasian component. What has changed a lot in the last five years is a lot of additional Hispanic in that demographic. . . . we would see that menthol would have additional opportunity.’’
The FDA cannot close that window of opportunity too soon.
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 
