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Menthol Cigarettes Addictive, Tobacco Control Measures

best quality kent cigaretteThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently considering whether to ban the use of menthol as Mentholated cigarettes account for roughly 30 percent of cigarettes sold in the United States, and they are favored by African-American smokers by roughly a threefold margin compared to white smokers. They are also favored by women smokers. A major aspect of the FDA charge is to determine whether use of mentholated cigarettes is more harmful than use of non-mentholated cigarettes.

Menthol became a focus of epidemiologists and tobacco-control scientists following the observation by a colleague of mine and me in a 1988 letter to the American Journal of Public Health that death rates for esophageal cancer among non-Whites (mainly African-Americans) had risen strikingly in parallel with the increase in menthol’s market share and that African American smokers tended to favor mentholated cigarettes.


Since then, a number of studies have addressed this question and have consistently failed to show that menthol has any effect beyond that of smoking per se. However, most studies focused on lung cancer—the most common smoking-related cancer—and few examined the association with esophageal cancer or cancers of the mouth and larynx.




Our approach was further justified by the fact that African-American smokers actually have lower cumulative smoke exposure compared to their white counterparts, since they smoke substantially fewer cigarettes per day on average and start smoking at a later age. Furthermore, alcohol consumption, the other major risk factor for esophageal cancer, also appears to be lower among African Americans.


As stated in our paper, the bottom line is that we still cannot explain why African Americans have higher rates of esophageal cancer and certain other smoking-related cancers compared to whites.

For smokers, the bottom line is that smoking is smoking, and that menthol is probably not important.


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