Black Cigarettes Matter: Tobacco Companies Recruit Sharpton and BLM to Call Cigarette Bans Racist; White House Delays Implementing Ban On Menthol Cigarettes Until At Least 2024

Black Cigarettes Matter:

Tobacco companies recruit Sharpton and BLM to call cigarette bans racist.

The Biden administration has tried to ban cars, gas stoves and oil drilling, but there was only one ban that it backed off on after meeting something scarier than the Bill of Rights.

Biden retreated from a menthol cigarette ban after pressure from Al Sharpton.

Sharpton’s National Action Network claimed that banning menthol cigarettes would hurt black people and issued a press release stating that it had reached this position after “working with Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner” and serial BLM litigator Ben Crump.

During a previous attempt by New York to ban menthols, Sharpton had been thrown into the fight alongside Garner’s mother and George Floyd’s brother.

Last year, ‘Mothers of the Movement’ a group that included Carr, along with “Philonise Floyd” (a brother, not a mother), and Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, claimed that they had taken part in a panel at Sharpton’s NAA led by Crump and that banning menthol cigarettes was racist.

The letter to Susan Rice was tweeted out by former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis who added a video hashtagged “#mentholisnotacrime”.

“When you ban a product mostly sold in black communities – as 80% of black smokers prefer menthol cigarettes… you must consider the fairness of such an approach as well as the reality of what will happen to that very same overrepresented community in the criminal justice system,” the family members argued.

The critical race theory logic of disproportionate impact was being used to argue that banning Kool cigarettes was racist.

The new Black Cigarettes Matter campaign linked high-profile deaths that incited BLM race riots to cigarettes. The new Black Cigarettes Matter martyrs included Eric Garner, who died during a struggle with police after selling illegal cigarettes, Michael Brown, who was shot in self-defense after assaulting a local clerk who had caught him stealing cigars, and George Floyd, who died of a drug overdose after he was accused of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. —>READ MORE HERE

White House Delays Implementing Ban on Menthol Cigarettes Until at Least 2024:

White House officials are reportedly taking more time to review a sweeping plan from U.S. health regulators to ban menthol from all cigarettes.

According to a Dec. 6 updated regulatory agenda, the review process will now continue into 2024, with a current target date of March to possibly implement the ban.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been developing a rule to eliminate menthol as a characterizing cigarette flavor since 2022. The federal agency estimates a ban on the flavor additive could prevent 300,000 to 650,000 smoking deaths over several decades. They claim most of the preventable deaths would be among minority groups and Americans of African descent, who disproportionately smoke menthol cigarettes.

In the proposed rule, the federal agency said the new product standard would reduce the appeal of cigarettes, particularly to youth and young adults, and possibly decrease the likelihood of them progressing to “regular cigarette smoking.” If the rule is successfully implemented, cigarette companies will have one year to phase out menthol. It’s unclear if they would face any penalties for failing to adhere to the new rule.

“In addition, the tobacco product standard would improve the health and reduce the mortality risk of current menthol cigarette smokers by decreasing cigarette consumption and increasing the likelihood of cessation,” the FDA rule reads.

According to the FDA, menthol is a flavor additive with a mint taste and aroma that aids in reducing the harshness and irritation of smoking. It says the additive also helps boost the appeal of cigarettes and makes the menthol variants interact with nicotine in the brain, enhancing the nicotine’s addictive effects. —>READ MORE HERE

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