For decades both the African-American and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities have been marked as “easy targets” by the tobacco industry, particularly menthol cigarette producers. R.J. Reynolds’s own internal marketing
plans revealed their sentiments about LGBT people. They labeled a Bay Area marketing campaign targeted at them “Project SCUM.” Clearly the name alone highlights their contempt for a community that has become hooked on their products at rates that are twice that of the general population.
Big Tobacco’s “gateway” cigarettes still remain on the market even though we’ve grown up in the era of the “Truth Campaign” and witnessed the millions of dollars Big Tobacco has paid to their victims for decades of deception and fraud. The consequences are dire, particularly for black and gay youth.
[pagebreak]
Menthol is particularly deadly. It has lured 19.2 million people in the United States into its “fresh and minty” grip, a million of which are adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 years old.
In the African-American community menthol producers lured us with ads that showed images of young black men with beautiful women, drinking liquor, spinning records, and dancing with captions reading “be Kool.”
Now more than 80 percent of black youth that smoke puff on menthols along with 71 percent of gay youth. These numbers signal that the predatory marketing undertaken by these “menthol pushers” in both communities is working and tremendously successful. The “hold” of menthol is so well built that researchers at the American Journal of Public Health say it leads to a lifetime of smoking.
[pagebreak]
As a kid I can remember wanting to seem “grown.” The easiest way to do that was to pick up a cigarette. The first time I took a puff I coughed my lungs out. Then a friend said to me, “Ew, don’t smoke those ‘nasty’ ones. Smoke the ones that taste like peppermint.”
Since advice from my 13 year-old friend was always “reliable” I did. And I kept the habit up until my early twenties. I often wondered whether I would have continued smoking after my initial horrendous experience if the cleverly masked peppermint cigarettes hadn’t been so readily available.
Thankfully, a recent report from the Center for American Progress, “Flavored Death and Disease for Minorities,” may finally have a solution to my decade-old question. They believe we should ban menthol, and I agree. In 2009 Congress directed the Food and Drug Administration to ban all other candy-, fruit-, and spice-flavored cigarettes but fell short of an outright ban on menthol. And it’s menthol that’s harming African Americans and gays the most because they suffer disproportionately from smoking-related diseases.
[pagebreak]
Menthol smokers themselves have reported to the National Cancer Institute that if menthol cigarettes were banned they would quit smoking. So we could save 300,000 lives and cut the smoking rates of both African Americans and gays and transgender folks in half. Sounds like a win-win to me.
A ban on menthol would go a long way to stop the next group of impressionable 13-year-olds from seeking advice from their “wise friends” who are connoisseurs of all things “minty fresh.”
After all, there’s nothing “fresh” or “cooling” about chemotherapy.
Danielle Moodie-Mills is an Advisor for LGBT Policy & Racial Justice at the Center for American Progress. Her work with the Fighting Injustice to Reach Equality, or FIRE, initiative explores the intersections between race, economics, and sexual orientation.
Follow her on Twitter @FIREFund
