The Biden administration wants to ban menthol cigarettes because menthol cigarettes, long most popular among communities of color, have been targeted by advocacy groups that believe menthol cigarettes are a “gateway” product in the mistaken belief that menthol cigarettes aren’t as “harsh” as regular cigarettes.
That’s hogwash. Menthol cigarettes are not smoother than regular cigarettes, says the former smoker who used to smoke them. That’s just tobacco company propaganda.
Menthol cigarettes are harsher than unflavored cigarettes. Anyone who doesn’t know this has never smoked a menthol cigarette.
Having said that, my real pet peeve is the very idea of banning menthol cigarettes instead of banning ALL cigarettes.
Banning ready-made cigarettes will not end smoking, but it will slow smokers down. Rolling your own is an acquired skill. It takes only a second to whip out a ready-made cigarette, but it takes upwards of a minute to roll your own…and when you are rolling your own, you can’t do anything else. You can drive a car, use a cell phone or even walk down the street while you are rolling a cigarette. Try it sometime, if you don’t believe me.
In the tobacco industry’s neverending campaign to murder their customers, the introduction of filtered cigarettes actually increased the disease and death rates from tobacco smoking exponentially. Note the dramatic increase in the number of smokers – and the number of dead smokers – that coincided with the introduction of filtered cigarettes.
They were invented in 1936 but did not become popular until after the Korean War., which is exactly the market in which the cancer rates from smoking began to soar in the early 1960s.
This was due, in part, to the distribution of free cigarettes to soldiers in WW2 and Korea. Cigarettes were packaged into both C rations (beginning in 1938) and K rations (beginning in 1942.) Those free cigarettes, included with every meal, hooked a generation of American soldiers on tobacco who would otherwise have never started smoking. The military stopped distributing cigarettes when the MREs were introduced in 1981.
The inclusion of free cigarettes in military rations from 1938 to 1981 was one of the greatest achievements of homicidal capitalism, making the U.S. government complicit in getting two generations of Americans hooked on tobacco. (And it didn’t stop there, because the wives of those veterans acquired the habit from their husbands. Women in the military were far less prone to smoking because smoking in public didn’t become acceptable for women until after World War II.)
Banning ready-made cigarettes will not end the smoking epidemic. There’s always cigars, pipes, and hookahs if you can’t get the hang of rolling your own. The government can’t very well ban cigars, and cigars – which are intrinsically less harmful than cigarettes unless, like Ulysses S. Grant, you smoked twenty or more of them per day – because very few people know how to roll a good cigar.
Die-hard smokers can even buy a very efficient, cheap machine that will roll a very neat cigarette for you if you can’t roll your own or don’t want to. You can even roll your own filtered cigarettes using one of those machines. I used to do that, too.
The point is that forcing everyone to roll their own would (a) significantly decrease the cost of smoking because loose tobacco is cheaper, (b) cut deeply into tobacco company profits, and (c) reduce the adverse health effects of smoking upon smokers and on the society that has to take care of sick smokers by slowing the smoker’s smoking down.
Trying to ban menthol cigarettes is an absurdity on top of an insanity because you can buy loose mentholated rolling tobacco and roll your own menthol cigarettes, which is exactly what will happen if menthol cigarettes are banned.
I quit smoking in 1981, when my son was born. I have COPD, so far only a relatively mild case. I used to steal my grandfather’s mentholated cigarettes when I was a kid. When he gave me his 1962 Ford Fairlane (loved that car) I discovered that the yellow plastic headliner wasn’t actually yellow. It was stained with cigarette smoke. I was already a smoker by then, having started at the age of 12.
The reason that cigarettes and other tobacco products have not been banned is that federal, state, and local governments all earn very significant tax revenues on the sale of tobacco products.
The federal government earns approximately $1 per pack of cigarettes, and that’s on top of state and local taxes. On average, state governments earn $1.91 per pack.
When was the last time your state opted to eliminate a product on which the state was earning “sin-taxes” on a consumer purchase? Ever heard of that happening? Me neither.
One of the reasons that we are still burning gasoline in our vehicles (instead of alcohol or hydrogen gas) is that state and federal governments are earning huge revenues on gasoline taxes…and that’s also the reason that we still see cigarettes for sale everywhere, although the once-ubiquitous cigarette vending machine is now only an unpleasant memory.
How this for a blast from the past: I can remember when there were vending machines in the New York City subway system that dispensed five packs of cigarettes in the exact same packaging that cigarettes were once distributed in those C and K rations. I can even remember when they took those vending machines away. They were attached to the metal girders that held up the roofs over the subway stations. When I started riding the subways in 1962, smoking was still allowed on the subway platforms and people smoked in the cars all the time.
I can also remember sitting in the first row of the non-smoking coach section of an airplane, which was right behind the last row of seats in the first-class smoking section. Aircraft cabins used to be arranged that way so that the non-smoking first-class passengers did not have to breathe in the smoke from the first-class smoking section.
So, the federal government will have to go to war with the states over a menthol cigarette ban…and that’s one battle in which the majority of the Blue states might find themselves aligned with the Red states on at least this one issue.
Criminal capitalism strikes again.
05/01/2021 @ 3:34 pm
Cigarettes occupied a very prominent place in my life for 25 years give or take. They still have a cushy little place in the furthest reaches of my brain.
I started at 13, when cigarettes cost .30 a pack (benson & hedges were .35).
Addiction didn’t come instantly. I had to find “my” brand and only then was I hooked. I worked my way up the chain from loosies to (i think) Winstons to Marlboro to B&H – i felt the extra nickle gave my silly teenaged ass some cache – then back to Marlboro or then to Newports.
When i hooked up with my first true love Leo – who smoked Luckys, which werent terrible with an appealing peppery taste i became a true smoker. But when Leo kissed me off i assuaged my broken heart by doggedly remaining nonfilterand taking on my tough girl personna and dug in, graduating myself to Camels. I didnt bother with Pall Malls or Chesterfields (which were truly disgusting) until my more mature teens. Ah but Camels dont age well and in fact become so ghastly stale they can choke a horse, and since my tough girl act had landed me in youth house for a few months where cigarettes were doled out only after meals, i had my parents bring me Luckys, eventually getting out, growing up and getting married making babies and softening my personna from hardboiled to mentholated femmegirl. (But never EVER sinking so low as to smoke those asshat skinny Virginia Slims).
I would progress up and down the cigarette scale according to my life circumstances but from my twenties on, i stayed true and loved me some Newports and sometimes Salems until the 80s/90s when i switched to an ultralight brand with a ventilated filter (the holes perfectly, deviously placed so a smoker would unwittingly cover the holes while holding to inhale. So much for ultralight).
By then i knew if i hoped to live a cancer free life, i needed to give them up but that took a while.
I think this business of “helping” AA people by eliminating menthol cigarettes is ridiculous. Alan you’re right: eliminate all cigarettes. Because telling Black Americans you’re not smart enough or strong enough to do it for yourself isnt just insulting – it’s saying they’re children and temptations need to be removed from them. But what about everyone else?
When it comes to addiction, everyone’s a child. No one wants to give up their drug of choice.
Shit! I still miss those little fuckers. But i went through hell to quit because I didn’t want to die of some awful preventable disease and still don’t so I don’t smoke. But there are millions of people who – for one reason or another – can’t or won’t quit.
If you’re worried about people’s health then worry about everyone’s health. Worry about children’s health. Worry about vape users too. Get rid of all that shit. Or leave all of it alone and let people choose. But please please please stop this pandering i care so much i cant stop thinking about ways to show you how woke i am crap and really start treating African Americans with respect. Like by giving them business or mortgage loans. Or passing goddamned policing guidelines legislation.
PS. If i ever get the word Im dying of some hideous disease and i can afford $20 a pack after the cost of all my medications AND cigarettes are still around, you know where me and my power wheelchair will be headed.
05/01/2021 @ 10:27 pm
That was one hell of a comment. I resonated with it to the ninth degree.
I started smoking at 12 when I was out on my newspaper route, beginning with Camels. I delivered the World-Telegram and Sun (actually The World-Telegram and The Sun) which was an evening paper, so I would deliver it after school. until started going to Brooklyn Tech.
When I started working for the NY Post, at 19, I was a confirmed addict, consuming three packs of Pall Mall per day. I smoke Parliaments because my best friend smoked them, and Salems because my grandfather smoked them. I smoked Gallois, Nat Sherman’s Virginia Ovals, Balkan Sobranie. In fact, I eventually tried every cigarette that Nat Sherman sold. and Sherman’s sold a lot of cigarette brands.
When I moved to Boston, I graduated to Leavitt and Pierce in Harvard Square, where they carried cigarettes from all over the world, including those nasty little biddies from India.
I was also into cigars and pipes. I wasn’t just a consumer. I was a connoisseur.
I quit cold turkey in 1981, when my son was born, and there’s a story behind that too. My father was a smoker until my sister was born in 1952. He came out of the hospital, opened a fresh pack, and started coughing his lungs out. Threw the pack away and never smoked again. When my son was born, I remembered that story and I never bought another pack of cigarettes again. Eventually, the people I kept bumming cigarettes from cut me off and that was that.
So now, almost 40 years later, here I am with one lung (having lost other one to a rare cancer that had nothing to do with having been a smoker), a gradually increasing COPD, unable to even inhale someone else’s second-hand smoke without coughing my lungs out, and yet I still crave an occasional cigar or pipe.
Maybe on my deathbed.
05/02/2021 @ 12:22 am
Oh yes Gallois. Those were the elegant cigarettes w the fancy tips, yes? Beautiful subtle color as i recall. Wider and so nice in the hand. Tasted like weasel ahit but they definitely looked much better than they smoked.
Ive been toying w a painting of a woman smoking for over a year. Shes gone thru countless incarnations. I overwork a surface. Love overworking. There are four versions, one on top of the other on the canvas. So ive been rather immersed in the cigarette thing for a while. Ive been missing them especially since the pandemic hit. Its prob good theyre up to a little less than 7 bucks a pack bc im simply too cheap to fritter my life away at such a steep price being im a pack and a half a day type, all the way.
If menthol is eliminated there goes my final nicotine bender. I can roll w the beat and i know how to use the little machines but thats no fun. Isnt part of it pulling the red tab around to unwrap the pack and getting that first whiff of fresh mentholated tobacco?
05/02/2021 @ 12:28 am
And yes i remember those cigarette machines in the subway AND the chewing gum machines too. Also flying and smoking and living large, being served a friggin meal. I dressed up when i flew. It was nice. Now its like riding in someone’s armpit. Or worse. Def un-nice.
05/02/2021 @ 8:00 am
I have never smoked cigarettes. I smoke about 10 cigars a year, which is a slightly different process from cigarette smoking. Cigarettes are inhaled, and cigars are not…or not supposed to be. Menthol versus regular cigarettes is along those lines, but worse. Menthol cigarettes are inhaled more deeply, and thus have greater effects. It is not that menthol is thought to be less harsh. It is that the menthol makes it easier to inhale deeply. Take makes it easier to get started…etc. That’s dangerous stuff.
05/02/2021 @ 11:01 am
Bitey, I know that is what is being said about mentholated cigarettes but I do not recall ever seeing any documentation to that effect. My subjective experience as someone who smoked heavily for 22 years is the exact opposite. I always found menthol cigarettes much harder on my lungs and throat, so just don’t buy the conventional wisdom on the subject, Furthermore, I recollect very clearly that when I was smoking menthols no one wanted to bum cigarettes off of me. When other smokers saw that I was smoking Kools or Salems, they would make snide comments about what I was smoking and went off to find someone smoking something more palatable to them, As someone who smaked very strong cigarettes, such as Gauloises, I had a strong standard for comparison.
05/02/2021 @ 11:13 am
I knew a woman back in the day who was really quite crazy. I haven’t thought about her in years but she is relevant to this discussion. She kinda infiltrated herself into the Sufi Khaniqah where I lived for several years and where she created a serious disruption that forced us to ban her from the house. The police were called. Very radical for a Sufi community to do that.
Years later, I ran into her again in the coffee house on the ground floor of the office building where I ran the state’s crisis intervention hotline. She had been quite beautiful once up a time, but she had aged tremendously over just a few years because she was a constant chain smoker and the chain-smoking had dried out and wrinkled her skin. She literally smoked herself like beef jerky. I believe she ended up in an institution. I’ve known a lot of crazy people in my life and she was probably the craziest of them all. Fodder for your speculations about a woman smoker.
05/02/2021 @ 11:44 am
I get you, and as a non smoker, I am not in a position to refute you, but I think there may be many tangential aspects to the social acceptance of aspects of culture that are or have been associated with Black people. Remember the hostility of the war on Disco back in the 1970s? From the perspective of a Black kid surrounded by white people, I could not understand the strong feelings about disco. It was positively loathed by white people, especially men…unless it wasn’t. It was associated with Black people and used as a way to express one’s feelings about them. So, so, so many things in America are like that. Even to a non smoker, I know that menthol cigarettes are a small example of that. Just look at the ads for Marlboro vs Kools. Many white people reject things associated with Black people…because it can be associated with Black people.
05/02/2021 @ 12:45 pm
Now you got me re-thinking this. I got my menthol jones from my white grandfather, so I never especially associated menthol cigarettes with black people. Fast forward twenty years. During the years that I worked in the drug treatment field, the vast majority of our clients were Black or Hispanic as were most of the staff. (There were several years that I was the only white person in the entire organization.)
We tried – off and on – to ban smoking from the program altogether. No one was allowed to smoke in the residential treatment programs due to fire safety laws, but residents were allowed to keep and smoke cigarettes outside the house. We even provided cigarettes. I now remember that we bought ten times as many menthol cigarettes as non-menthol, literally…but I still didn’t associate menthol with people of color because I had virtually no outside reference. I ate all my meals in the facilities in order to make sure that the food quality was being kept up and also because I am a cheap Jew and the food was free. I even slept there from time to time when I was too tired to drive home. I remember being ridiculed when I tried to become a vegetarian and passed on the meat dishes for awhile, until the banter got the better of me. If you are getting the impression that I loved those years, yeah, I did. Never felt as at home anywhere else, not even when I worked for Jewish organizations.
Thanks for bringing up the recollection for me.
06/19/2021 @ 3:06 pm
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