Researchers: Tobacco firms manipulate menthol to hook young smokers

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Hoping to lure a new generation of smokers, tobacco companies routinely manipulate levels of menthol so that their cigarettes prove more appealing and less harsh to novice users, Boston researchers reported today.

Scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health scoured thousands of pages of industry documents from the 1980s, '90s, and more recently, and commissioned laboratory tests of menthol cigarettes to uncover a strategy that was decades in the making.

The researchers found that tobacco companies embrace a Goldilocks approach when launching brands: Add too little menthol, which has an effect akin to anesthesia, and tobacco retains its intense bite. Add too much, and first-time smokers are overwhelmed. Add just the right amount, and cigarettes become powerfully seductive.

A 1987 internal memo from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of the menthol Salem cq brand, succinctly summarized the benefits of low-level menthol cigarettes, as "Smoother more refreshing tobacco taste." Such a product, the memo declared, would be a "proven winner" targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds.

The findings, published on-line by the American Journal of Public Health, arrive at a critical moment, with Congress close to giving the US Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. But tobacco-control advocates are bitterly split over what the law lacks: an outright ban on menthol.

"As you always find when you go digging into the industry documents, the companies are very smart and very thorough and don't do anything by accident," said Stanton Glantz, a tobacco control researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. "This is a very important element of cigarette marketing and design."

Smoking, which is linked to cancer, heart disease, and other ailments, is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

Scientists not involved with the Harvard project hailed it as a landmark piece of research, sketching the richest portrait so far of how the industry uses menthol to attract customers. Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco control researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, said it "really demonstrates that menthol is playing a major role in maintaining cigarette consumption and especially in recruiting and supporting addiction among youth and young adults."

Representatives of large tobacco companies decried the study, with Lorillard Tobacco Co., maker of Newport and other menthol products, insisting in a statement that the firm "does not control levels of menthol to promote smoking among adolescents and young adults."