Flavored cigarettes attract minors to smoking
Published on June 30, 2008 6:42 AM
Health researchers found that flavored cigarettes attract minors to smoking. That’s why for the first time, Congress is attempting to regulate tobacco by eliminating cigarette flavoring such as clove and cinnamon in an effort to minimize its appeal to minors.
For example menthol cigarettes are an integral brand to the American cigarette industry and are responsible for 28% of the $70 billion American cigarette market.
Congress wants to regulate of menthol exactly in the same way it plans to regulate other tobacco flavorings.
According to a study about 75 percent of black smokers use menthol brands, yet only about one in four white smokers prefer them. National Cancer Institute data indicated that black men suffer lung cancer at a 50 percent higher rate than white men.
Dr. Mark J. Pletcher, a researcher at University of California, analyzed the smoking behavior of 1,535 people over the course of 15 years, which suggested that menthol smokers were 30 percent less likely to quit smoking and 89 percent more likely to relapse.
"I think we can say definitively that menthol induces smoking in the African-American community and subsequently serves as a direct link to African-American death and disease," said Robert Robinson, retired associate director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The surveys that researchers have done among smokers show that they want and desire flavored products and nothing can stop them.
The bottom line is that Congress needs to weigh the health concerns of all Americans, especially blacks, ahead of the campaign contributions of the tobacco industries. Anything less would be discrimination through regulation. That discrimination could ultimately lead to more deaths.
Congress needs to include menthol in the tobacco flavor regulation because only then will it be equal legislation.
Generally flavored cigarettes are an expanding product being aggressively promoted by tobacco companies eager to shore up declining sales.