USA
TODAY reported on the FDA’s attempt to ban menthol cigarettes—heavily
marketed to Blacks for many decades—which has sparked debates even within the
Black community. The publication provided in-depth coverage on the ways that the
product has been advertised and promoted, likely with budgets well beyond the
standard crumbs
allocated to campaigns of color and multicultural
advertising agencies. It all exposes yet another form of racist inequity
prevalent in Adland that definitely ain’t cool—any way you spell it.
Targeted menthol cigarette ads helped lead to high
Black usage. Should they be banned?
By Tiffany Cusaac-Smith
After decades of Big Tobacco advertisements
splattered across billboards, tucked inside buses and hung outside corner
stores in Black and Latino neighborhoods, Henry McNeil “Mandrake” Brown had
seen enough.
Using the alias “Mandrake,” Brown started
painting over cigarette and alcohol advertisements in his Chicago community in
the 1980s and 1990s, according to historians and media archives. He called the
advertisements a multipronged practice “to sustain and expand sales to
minorities, to women and the poor.”
At the same time, a handful of Black leaders
and doctors were fighting against an overabundance of these advertisements in
African American communities compared with whiter areas. The Rev. Calvin Butts,
the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, painted over billboards in
New York City.
Uptown cigarettes, a mentholated brand geared
directly to Black consumers — would’ve been tested in Philadelphia, but
grassroots opposition and resistance from then-Health and Human Services
Secretary Dr. Louis Sullivan led R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to cancel those
plans in 1990.
After the release of director Spike Lee’s “Malcolm
X,” a tobacco company created Menthol X, which was booted in 1995 after a
significant outcry. Its box featured a large X like the film’s poster and the
Pan-African flag colors — black, red, and green, according to newspaper
archives.
These earlier forms of resistance are, in
many ways, fundamental to the Food and Drug Administration’s move to ban the
sale of menthol cigarettes. The public can submit comments on the proposed
change through Aug. 2, according to the FDA.
Over the course of decades, marketing menthol
cigarettes to Black people fostered an environment where today, most Black
smokers use the product.
“The net result of these predatory marketing
strategies is the Black community is suffering unfairly and disproportionately
from tobacco-related disease,” according to a statement from the Congressional
Black Caucus Health Braintrust, a health care advisory task force for the
caucus.
Dr. Alan Blum, director of the University of
Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, said when it comes to
Black people smoking menthols, “advertising works.”
“If in Ebony and Jet and billboards and
convenience stores the only brands you see advertised are menthol brands, there’s
no mystery,” he said.
The proposed ban has caused a divide within
the Black community. Anti-smoking advocates and many in the medical community
who support the ban have pointed out that smoking contributes to cancer, and
African Americans are more likely to develop and die of lung cancer.
On the other side, some Black clergy, law
enforcement groups, and publications — many of whom have received money or
advertisement revenue from the tobacco industry — say Black people have the
choice to use mentholated products and that banning them could lead to negative
interactions with police.
Black community divided over proposed menthol
ban
Tobacco companies began targeting Black
consumers in the mid-1960s, chasing after a new urban market created by the
Great Migration. They avoided scrutiny in part through lavish donations to
Black civic organizations.
In 2019, there were more than 18.5 million
menthol cigarette smokers, according to the FDA.
Between 1980 and 2018, menthol cigarettes
were responsible for 157,000 premature deaths and 1.5 million life-years lost
among Black people, according to a study from the University of Michigan.
Keith Wailoo, a history and public affairs
professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, said the marketing of menthol
products to Black people linked itself to Black identity and aspirations while
seeking to avoid backlash from possible white consumers of the product.
“It’s not that they (tobacco companies) are
earnestly concerned with Black representation in advertisements,” he said. “They’re
concerned with how the incorporation of Black imagery in ads can help with
sales, but not to the extent that it alienates non-Black consumers."
In the spring of 1963, Black people
represented 19% of the menthol cigarette market, historians and advocates said.
Today, nearly 85% of Black smokers use menthol, compared to 30% of white
smokers, the FDA said.
David Mendez, a lead author of the Michigan
study and a health management and policy professor at the university, said
menthol cigarettes reduce the irritation and harshness of smoking through their
smooth, minty flavor profile.
Because the cigarette user does not cough or
feel the less healthy aspects of smoking, they are less inclined to quit, he
said. Menthol also works with nicotine to enhance nicotine’s addictive effects.
Banning menthol will save thousands of lives,
Mendez said.
“This is the closest we have been,” Mendez
said of the proposed prohibition.
Yet the ban has seen some resistance from
some tobacco companies and others.
“We strongly believe that there are more
effective routes to deliver tobacco harm reduction than banning menthol in
cigarettes,” R.J. Reynolds said in a statement to a request for comment.
Diane Goldstein, executive director of the
Law Enforcement Action Partnership, said banning menthols is another iteration
of the war on drugs, which disproportionately has harmed Black people. LEAP is
an organization comprised of prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement that
advocates for criminal justice and drug policy reforms.
“When we ban a substance, we don’t end its
use,” she said. “We just shift those profits from licensed, taxpaying shopkeepers
to criminal organizations, leading to easier access for children, unregulated
and impure products for consumers, and unnecessary diversions from violent
crime for police.”
In announcing the proposed ban, the FDA said
it wouldn’t enforce the prohibition against individual users of menthol
products. Instead, an implemented ban would focus its enforcement on retailers,
distributors and others.
“If these proposed rules are finalized and
implemented, FDA enforcement will only address manufacturers, distributors,
wholesalers, importers and retailers who manufacture, distribute, or sell such
products within the U.S. that are not in compliance with applicable
requirements,” a statement read.
The FDA said banning menthol would help
prevent children from becoming the next generation of smokers and helps adult
smokers quit.
Anti-smoking organizations said the talking
points of LEAP and some other Black organizations use Black anxieties around
hostile police encounters to get around regulating the market.
In the turbulence of the civil rights
movement, tobacco companies hired Black workers when some companies wouldn’t.
They supported and contributed to cultural events such as the Kool Jazz
Festival, a series of concerts targeting African American consumers, according
to Stanford University in California.
In many advertisements, tobacco companies
portrayed Black people in a positive light.
Tobacco companies also placed ads in
Black-owned newspapers and magazines, providing needed advertisement revenue
for the outlets.
“They started getting our figures, our
actors, our sports figures, and the like. They started coming into our
communities. And the real thing is that they did they understood our history
and culture,” said Delmonte Jefferson, executive director of The Center for
Black Health & Equity, a health organization benefiting Black people that
is anti-menthol products.
“They supported everything, and they got our
loyalty,” he said. “And as a result, they got our death.”
Menthol ads went after Black consumers for
decades
“Feel the extra coolness in your throat,”
read one 1964 cigarette advertisement featuring a handsome Black couple with
Kool menthol cigarettes lodged in their hands as they stood in an oasis.
The ad was one of many that came amid the
Great Migration of Black people out of the American South and into cities such
as New York and Chicago and the civil rights movement, historians say. Medical
research linking cigarettes to cancer and other ailments also pushed many
people to reconsider smoking, forcing tobacco companies to expand their
outreach in search of new consumers.
Menthol cigarettes were created by Lloyd “Spud”
Hughes in the 1920s when he mixed menthol and cigarettes. For the first few
decades of the product’s existence, it was marketed as a “healthier” cigarette.
Marketers went to corner stores in Black
neighborhoods to track the progress of cigarette sales. They asked workers why
they had chosen to invest with a particular cigarette brand.
In St. Louis, the tobacco industry recognized
that Black men didn’t watch television at the same levels as their white
counterparts in the 1960s, according to “Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial
Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette.”
Through market research, consultants recognized
Black consumers would listen to trusted sources in their community —- bellhops,
barbers, etc. Consultants then secretly gave menthol cigarettes to those
figures, who then started dispersing them in their communities, the book said.
Segregation in cities such as Detroit, New
York and Philadelphia also allowed tobacco companies to place ads in Black
neighborhoods without fear of white backlash, historians say.
“When you put it all together, the tobacco
industry has given literally millions of dollars to black, civic, religious,
political, educational organizations in our community. So, it’s essentially
been a full-court press,” said Phillip Gardiner, co-chair of the African
American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, a California-based organization
that supports a national menthol ban.
By the time Tiffany Glover, 45, started
smoking, the pathway had been set. Both of her parents smoked cigarettes,
though not menthol cigarettes.
Her journey began as a sophomore in college,
just a few years after her mother’s death from lung cancer in 1994.
Glover recalls the pull of menthols. On one
end, she saw cigarette marketing in leading Black publications, plus they were
a few dollars cheaper than non-menthol cigarettes. Glover said she felt that
she needed them to fit in, “wanting to be cool.”
Peers at the time told her, “You need to
smoke menthols. They taste better.”
This confluence soon led her to smoke about a
pack of Newport menthol cigarettes daily.
“It just became a full-blown addiction,” said
Glover, a math teacher in Natchitoches, Louisiana. “I was really starting to
really desire the smoking. The peer stuff didn’t matter anymore. I wanted to
smoke.”
‘I can’t breathe’
Billboards and other advertisements in Black communities
were removed because of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, the largest civil
litigation settlement in the nation’s history at the time.
Seven tobacco companies agreed to pay more
than $200 billion to 46 states, Washington, D.C., and several territories. The
money was set aside as compensation for taxpayer money used in tobacco-related
ailments and losses to local economies, according to the agreement.
The agreement also removed tobacco
advertising that included cartoons, as well as those geared to people under 18.
The agreement also banned the use of cigarette advertisements on merchandise.
In the intervening years, smoking levels have
decreased, but menthol still has a problematic hold on Black Americans. States
such as Massachusetts and California, as well as Washington, D.C., have banned
menthol cigarettes, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, an
advocacy organization seeking to reduce tobacco use.
Cities such as Chicago and Jersey City are
among the dozens that have restricted the sale of menthol products, according
to the organization.
In 2009, the Obama administration banned
flavored cigarettes but left off tobacco and menthol.
Groups opposed to the menthol bans have
pointed to the death of Eric Garner, who was killed in a fatal confrontation
with the New York City Police Department after being accused of selling untaxed
cigarettes known as loosies. They worry more Black people will be punished for
selling cigarettes under a ban.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said in a letter to Susan
Rice, White House domestic policy advisor, that a menthol cigarette ban could
mean that some economically disadvantaged smokers might try to create homemade
menthol cigarettes. Sharpton’s organization has taken money from the tobacco
industry.
Wailoo, the Princeton professor, said Garner’s
plea of “I can’t breathe” in some ways mirrors the experience of thousands of
Black people who have died because of tobacco usage.
“It’s been a slow and deliberate process of
constraining people’s lungs, constraining their health, and it leads exactly to
the same place: I can’t breathe. The only difference is that, in the case of
George Floyd, in the case of Eric Garner, we can see this happens in a couple
of minutes,” he said. “And we can see who the culprit is that is driving the
death of those young men. In the case of the menthol cigarette, it happens over
decades.”
For Glover, the Louisiana teacher, her
reckoning around cigarettes came around a decade ago. Her eldest daughter, then
16, was the same age as when Glover lost her mother to lung cancer. If she didn’t
quit, Glover thought, she might not be there for her as she entered adulthood.
“If you don’t quit smoking, you’re not going
to be able to get the chance to see what it’s like,” she thought to herself.
At that thought, she decided to put down the
habit, removing ashtrays from her house and using nicotine patches and other
methods.
Loved ones and friends coached her on, even
waiting with her in restaurant parking lots as she used chewing gum to fight
the urge to have a cigarette after a meal.
After she quit, her eldest daughter expressed
relief that she had stopped — a surprise to Glover because she thought her
daughter had no opinion on the matter.
As for the menthol cigarette ban, she said, the
more lives saved, the better.
