FDA, stop giving menthol a pass

Rye Brook, N.Y.: In 2017, as a high school freshman, I watched flavored e-cigarettes sweep through my school, addict my friends and classmates and ruin many students’ academics and health. In 2019 and 2020, I led the youth charge for an e-cigarette flavor ban in New York, a policy that ended the sale of these beguiling addictive products in the state once and for all. However, our state’s tobacco regulation has a gaping loophole: it fails to fully ban menthol tobacco products.

Since the 1950s, Big Tobacco has targeted the Black community, especially Black teens, using predatory, deceptive marketing practices to sell menthol cigarettes. These are harder to quit, more addictive and easier to start because of menthol’s ability to numb the throat to the harshness of tobacco. Today, 76.8% of Black smokers use menthol, far higher than any other community, and tobacco use claims the lives of more than 45,000 Black people each year.

Despite advocacy by many in the Black and tobacco prevention communities, Big Tobacco’s racist stranglehold and our nation’s complacency have kept menthol on the market. In 2009, a federal ban on flavored cigarettes carved out an exception for just one flavor. Which one? Menthol.

This has to stop. Racial justice and public health demand that we ban menthol just as we do every other flavor. The FDA and the Biden administration have the evidence they need to save lives: the FDA must act by a court-ordered April 29 deadline and ban the sale of menthol cigarettes once and for all.