Smoking: Should menthols be banned?
The Food and Drug Administration has taken its “single most important step” to “reduce the deadly impact” of smoking, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. Last week, the agency said it will move to ban menthol cigarettes, a measure long pursued by anti-smoking advocates. When Congress banned flavored cigarettes in 2009, menthols got a carve-out, but it’s past time to do away with the “insidious” products, whose minty flavors “mask the abrasiveness of tobacco smoke,” lead people to inhale more deeply, and make it “easier for people to start smoking and harder for them to quit.” Since 85 percent of Black smokers favor menthols, a ban would also have “significant racial justice implications.” My childhood neighborhood was filled with billboards for menthol cigarettes, which Big Tobacco has used to “hook Black children,” said pediatrician Nia Heard-Garris in USA Today. Eliminating these deadly products now is a way to “affirm that indeed Black lives matter.”
A menthol prohibition could have “severe negative consequences” for those it aims to protect, said Eli Lehrer in NationalReview.com. Banning this type of cigarette, research indicates, will produce only a modest decline in smoking. But it almost certainly will lead to a boom in bootleg sales of menthols from Mexico in Black communities that “already suffer from over-policing,” leading to more fines, arrests, and confrontations with cops. That’s why the ACLU and other social justice groups oppose a menthol ban. In the inevitable black market that a ban would create, “small-time sellers” would predominate, said Jacob Grier in Reason.com. They’d be people like Eric Garner of Staten Island, N.Y., who was choked to death by police during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes.
The irony is that as “liberal scolds” continue their war on smoking, the cannabis business booms, said Matthew Walther in TheAmerican Conservative.com. Now “quasi-legal in 33 states,” marijuana pulls in some $17.5 billion annually. And while tobacco marketing has been reduced to “manufacturers’ coupons sent discreetly by mail, like Victorian pornography,” billboards for marijuana dispensaries “line the highways of my home state of Michigan.” By the time my children are old enough to smoke, they’ll have to walk past bustling weed outlets and furtively seek out “a man in a Hawaiian shirt in the back of a shady apartment complex in the hope of a nicotine fix.”