Menthol Cigarettes Could Finally Be Banned In March

Tobacco use is the No. 1 cause of death among Black Americans.

Menthol cigarettes appear to be on the verge of being banned by the FDA, driven by mounting pressure from advocacy groups such as the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. Bloomberg reports that the council staged a “menthol funeral” on Jan. 18 to push the White House into fulfilling its pledge to address the issue of menthol cigarettes.

A final ruling on menthol cigarettes has been pushed back several times, most recently to March 2024. An FDA spokesperson told MedPage Today via email that the organization “remains committed to issuing the tobacco product standards for menthol in cigarettes and characterizing flavors in cigars as expeditiously as possible; these rules have been submitted to OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] for review, which is the final step in the rulemaking process. As we’ve made clear, these product standards remain at the top of our priorities.”

States like California and Massachusetts have already banned all flavored cigarettes, including menthol.

Experts say that due to aggressive advertising campaigns specifically targeting the Black community, Black people are much more likely to smoke menthols than other groups of people. Menthol-flavored cigarettes also work differently than regular cigarettes, both removing the harsh profile of traditional cigarettes and making menthols easier to inhale, as well as enhancing nicotine’s already addictive qualities.

The unique impact that menthol cigarettes have had on Black smokers has led to a healthy debate about what to do about this flavor of cigarette. The 2009 Tobacco Control Act failed to ban the nicotine flavor outright, leaving the matter in the hands of the FDA, giving the government program broad authority over regulating tobacco products and a mandate to consider doing something about menthol cigarettes.

According to the American Lung Association, tobacco use is the No. 1 cause of death among Black Americans, killing 45,000 people each year. Furthermore, their research indicates that ending the sale of menthol cigarettes would result in approximately one million smokers kicking the habit within 17 months, including 250,000 Black Americans. In April 2013, the American Lung Association asked the FDA to eliminate menthol flavoring from cigarettes.

The petition was updated in 2021. The update reads, in part, “On Apr. 12, 2013, the Public Health Law Center and eighteen co-signers filed a citizen petition calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to add menthol to the list of prohibited characterizing flavors for cigarettes and cigarette smoke. The citizen petition included extensive information on the impacts of menthol in cigarettes, including the scientific evidence gathered by the FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee (TPSAC).”

The update continued, “The original petitioners and the undersigned organizations maintain that the FDA has had more than enough information to prohibit menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes since the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (TCA or the Act) was signed into law. Because the FDA has yet to substantively respond to the citizen petition nearly eight years later, we are filing this supplement.”