Health / Wellness, Minority Issues

When Will Black People Be Free Of Menthols?

And why would you ban cigarettes that are marketed to black people, but not ban cigarettes marketed to white people?

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(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

An association of African-American doctors has urged President Obama to ban menthol cigarettes.

Menthols, as you might have noticed if you’ve ever been north of 110th Street, are kind of a thing in the black community. Black people smoking menthols is such a cultural stereotype that sometimes when I buy cigarettes they hand me a pack of Newports even though I asked for something else. And I cannot actually recall seeing anybody besides a black person smoke a Kool.

Like all stereotypes, it’s not really fair. To the extent that African-Americans are more likely to smoke menthols than other groups, it’s because menthols are relentlessly advertised in black communities. If Matt Weiner had any black friends, there would have been a whole story arc on Mad Men where the Kool account was floundering and Don Draper, fresh off a rendezvous with a secret black girlfriend, comes up with the brilliant idea of selling them to black people, Godfather style.

You know what doesn’t help fight against the stereotype? Black doctors asking the black President to ban menthols. What kind of weak-ass policy proposal is that? We’re dealing with a nexus of addiction and advertising that goes back generations. The fix isn’t to say, “Mister President, we are powerless to fight these forces, please ban them and make them go away.”

Just listen to this argument, and try not to fall asleep while surrounded by its intellectual softness:

“Young African-Americans die disproportionately from tobacco-related disease compared to other people in the population,” said [Dr. Phillip Gardiner], who is policy and regulatory sciences program officer for the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program at the University of California-Berkeley.

Government and medical data back him up.

According to the American Lung Association, smoking-related illnesses are the single biggest preventable cause of death among African-Americans, killing about 45,000 a year. And “the key thing that African-Americans smoke is menthol cigarettes,” Gardiner said.

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No, no, the “key thing” is that African-Americans are smoking CIGARETTES. The research is all over the map on whether menthols are actually more dangerous than regular cigarettes, but banning MINT from your cancer delivery system is not the answer.

Even if you banned menthols, what’s to stop Newport from making some other flavored cigarette, then pushing it on the black community with all of their advertising might? What are you even asking President Obama to ban?

And why would you ban cigarettes that are marketed to black people, but not ban cigarettes marketed to white people? Or all people? Obama, allegedly, smokes/smoked Marlboro Reds. He’s black, are we going to ban them too? Is it somehow okay for white people to get throat cancer smoking Lucky Strikes, but we have to make the world safe for African-Americans smoking Newports? What about Virginia Slims? Who will speak for the ladies who are too impressionable to decide for themselves?

This is a dumb idea, wrapped in paternalism, which attacks the symptom and not the cause.

Black Doctors Call on Obama to Ban Menthol Tobacco Products [NBC News]

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