Decision delayed on a menthol cigarette ban

Biden accused of trying to appease Black voters

The Biden administration said Friday that it is delaying a decision on whether to ban menthol cigarettes, effectively quashing a proposal that has divided Black American voters and fueled million-dollar lobbying campaigns from the tobacco industry in this presidential election year.

The White House has faced considerable resistance from the cigarette companies that would lose billions of dollars if they could no longer sell menthol cigarettes. Opponents took to the airwaves to warn of a spike in cartel traffic along the border from counterfeit cigarette smuggling and of police violence targeting Black residents if a ban were in force.

Those efforts posed risks for President Biden, whose support among Black voters has at times slipped in recent months.

Some of Biden’s top health officials have said that a ban would save lives and protect against lung cancer, which is a higher risk for Black smokers, who have historically favored menthol cigarettes and are heavily targeted by tobacco companies.

“This rule has garnered historic attention, and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the civil rights and criminal justice movement,” Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, said in a statement. “It’s clear that there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time.”

The decision highlighted a debate among senior federal officials over how to weigh the political and legal consequences of a ban against public health.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment and referred to Becerra’s statement.

Becerra, the administration’s highest-ranking federal health official, said in an interview earlier this year that he had continued to push the White House to support the ban.

“We started to pull together all the elements of a good proposal to move on something we’ve known for decades: that menthol is killing Americans in disproportionate numbers when it comes to smoking,” he said.

“It should surprise no one that we’re continuing to push ’til the very end,” he said in the interview.

Dr. Robert Califf, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner and a supporter of the ban, told House lawmakers at a budget hearing this month that he hoped regulators would be able to issue a decision by the end of the year.

“It’s one of our top priorities, so I would sure hope so,” he said.

The FDA had previously described the effort as a “critical piece” of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, noting that about 30 percent of all cancer deaths are caused by smoking. Studies projected that a ban could avert as many as 650,000 smoking-related deaths.

A majority of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the ban. On Friday, Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, rebuked the president, saying Biden was choosing politics over people’s lives.

“Today’s news from the Biden administration is a blow to the Black community, who continue to be unfairly targeted and unjustly killed by Big Tobacco,” Johnson said. “Let’s be clear — valuing Black lives should not be used as a pawn to get our people to the polls, but rather a platform that our leaders refuse to step down from.”

Democrats have fretted for months about Biden’s soft support among Black voters — in particular Black men. Polls have consistently shown Biden with support from a substantially smaller percentage of Black men than he had in the 2020 election, which was itself a smaller portion than Democratic presidential candidates took in prior elections.

The ban had also united an array of public health groups, including leading lung, heart, cancer, and pediatric associations.

They cited years of data suggesting that menthol cigarettes, long marketed to Black smokers, make it more palatable to start smoking and more difficult to stop.

Many of those groups expressed outrage Friday about the delay, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“The White House fell for industry rhetoric and, as a result, public health will suffer,” said Dr. Karen E. Knudsen, the CEO of the American Cancer Society.

The FDA formally proposed the ban in May 2022, saying there were 18.5 million smokers who preferred menthol brands in the United States. Researchers looking at similar moves in other nations estimated that a ban could result in nearly a quarter of menthol smokers quitting altogether.