What Are You Smokin'? Racist Menthols

Posted Jun 26th 2008 9:00AM by Carmen Dixon

A bill before Congress would give control of tobacco products to the Food and Drug Administration.

The bill would ban flavor additives such as mint, clove and vanilla, which appeal to young people. But menthol flavored cigarettes would still be available. Since 75% of black people who smoke choose menthol, you might say that this bill excludes blacks from a protective benefit.

And for that reason, some say it's racist . On the other hand, supporters of keeping menthol available ask what could possibly be racist about giving grown black folks access to the flavor of poison they prefer?

And why do black folks smoke menthols anyway? There's no certain answer, but Radar magazine took an entertaining stab at tackling the question:

By the 1960s, magazines like Ebony and Jet were packed with cigarette advertisements that featured African-American models and referenced black culture, like Lorillard's "Newport is a whole new bag of menthol smoking" (after James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag") and R.J. Reynold's "Different Smokes for Different Folks" (a nod to a Sly Stone hit) campaign for Salem Extra. Some of the ads seemed almost progressive, encouraging the era's burgeoning black middle class to "Come Up to the Kool Taste," and promising them that smoking a Kool was "Like riding a Rolls Royce."

To make further inroads, the tobacco companies loudly supported the Civil Rights Movement and later made regular and significant contributions to organizations like the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. By the early '80s, when a young Kool G Rap (neé Nathaniel Wilson) was growing up in Queens, mentholated cigarettes had become so ingrained in the black community they were widely considered the Official Cigarettes of Black Folks.

Chalk this up as another win for big tobacco; and another big disaster for the health and well being of black folk. More from Radar:

But the black people-menthols metric has had some particularly nasty results: According to the CDC, African Americans are at least 50 percent more likely to develop lung cancer than white smokers, which is partly because African Americans metabolize nicotine more slowly. Recent research from Harvard also suggests that this has something to do with the mint sticks-the cooling, anesthetic effect once seen as medicinally beneficial may actually just be numbing the throat enough to facilitate deeper inhalation.

So back to the original question: Is it racist to ban all cigarette flavors except menthol? Or should black folks have the freedom to pick their own poison?