It has been more than a decade since Congress passed the Tobacco Control Act, the landmark law that empowers the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, but only now is the agency close to bringing the law’s full power to bear on a primary driver of preventable disease: combustible cigarettes.
The FDA announced last week that it would ban menthol in cigarettes; it’s the only flavoring that tobacco companies are still allowed to add. This is a positive step. But it should be only the prelude to what would be perhaps the biggest single move to discourage cigarette use that the federal government has ever taken. The FDA can require tobacco companies to cut the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to minimally addictive or nonaddictive levels, which the Biden administration is also considering.
In the 2009 Tobacco Control Act, Congress banned flavored cigarettes, except in the case of menthols, because of racial sensitivities: Many Black smokers prefer menthols. But it would not have been discriminatory to ban menthol flavoring along with all the others; it is discriminatory to permit the sale of a product that is especially harmful to Black Americans while acting to protect the public health of others.
Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, pointed out that tobacco companies targeted Black Americans for addiction, and failing to regulate a product that disproportionately harms Black people only enhances deadly racial health disparities.
The FDA cites studies suggesting that banning menthols would encourage nearly 1 million people to quit smoking, about a quarter of them Black, in the first 12 to 18 months. The ban would prevent some 633,000 deaths, 237,000 of them among Black Americans.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Concerns that a ban would lead police to target Black smokers are understandable, given historical and present policing disparities. But the ban would criminalize production and sale of menthol cigarettes, not possession or use.
Banning menthols is not just about helping the Black community. Menthol flavoring also promotes cigarette use for youths because it masks the harshness of tobacco smoke.
But the FDA has yet to embrace the really big prize in tobacco policy: reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to very low levels.
On its own, nicotine is not nearly as harmful as the other chemicals that smokers breathe in. If they could get their nicotine fix only through cigarette alternatives, such as gums, patches or e-cigarettes, they would do far less damage to their bodies. Or they could take the opportunity to quit entirely. A 2018 FDA study found that 5 million adult smokers could quit smoking within a year, that more than 33 million people might never become smokers over the course of this century, and that the smoking rate could fall from 15% to 1.4%.
It is past time to make this move.