The Food and Drug Administration proposed a pair of rules on Thursday that would ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, saying that menthol “makes it more difficult to quit smoking.”
The proposed ban “would, among other things, improve the health and reduce the mortality risk of current smokers of menthol cigarettes or flavored cigars by substantially decreasing their consumption and increasing the likelihood of cessation,” F.D.A. commissioner Dr. Robert Califf told a Senate committee.
Teenagers and African Americans are more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than other groups, according to the CDC. Nearly 85 percent of black smokers use menthol cigarettes, while just 29 percent of white smokers use menthol cigarettes, according to a government survey cited by the New York Times. Black men men have the highest rates of lung cancer in the U.S., according to the CDC.
“The proposed rules would help prevent children from becoming the next generation of smokers and help adult smokers quit,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said.
“Additionally, the proposed rules represent an important step to advance health equity by significantly reducing tobacco-related health disparities,” he added.
If the U.S. rules proved as successful as a similar ban in Canada, a projected 1.3 million people would quit smoking and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths could be prevented, Geoffrey Fong, principal investigator of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project, told the New York Times.
“This is potentially an extraordinary, landmark intervention to reduce the No. 1 preventable cause of death and disease,” Fong said.
Menthol, which is a chemical derived from the mint plant that can also be made in a lab, is used in cigarettes to provide a cooling sensation in the throat. While tobacco companies say menthol cigarettes are “smoother” than other cigarettes, they “are not less harmful than other cigarettes and they are likely a greater risk to public health than non-menthol cigarettes,” according to the CDC.
Menthol cigarettes made up more than a third of all cigarette sales in the U.S. as of 2018, “the highest proportion since major tobacco companies were required to report those data,” the CDC said.
Meanwhile, more than half a million young Americans use flavored cigars, which comes in flavors such as strawberry, grape, cocoa and fruit punch and “increase appeal and make cigars easier to use.”
The FDA said the new rule would “reduce the appeal of cigars … and decrease the likelihood of experimentation, development of nicotine dependence, and progression to regular use.”
The proposed rule will be open for public comments for at least 60 days before it is finalized and is expected to take at least a year to take effect.