Our Position:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) submitted their rule to ban menthol cigarettes to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for final review.  This triggers a 30- to 90-day review period by the OMB.

The federal ban on menthol cigarettes will achieve little more than the following:

Hurt Small Businesses: Convenience stores, bars, gas stations and restaurants that sell menthol cigarettes are independent businesses that pay taxes and create jobs in local communities. And according to National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), cigarettes accounted for nearly 30% of sales, over 10% of gross margins and contributed over $54 billion to the industry.

Take funding from schools: A significant amount of tobacco taxes go to fund critical government services such as education, infrastructure and more. State governments collect $19 billion from tobacco taxes and the Federal government collects another $12.5 billion. The non-partisan Tax Foundation said that a menthol cigarette ban would cost states $6.6 billion in tax revenue in the first year. For example, $60 million lost in Arizona; $124 million lost in Georgia, $308 million in Florida; $328 million lost in Texas.

Criminalize communities of color: Banning menthol cigarettes will increase negative interactions with police, leading to the incarceration and penalization of people of color. This is because 50% of Hispanic adults who smoke use menthol cigarettes and 80% of African American adults who smoke use menthol cigarettes. A ban would kick start a waterfall of state-level legal framework for further enforcement. This will almost certainly result in a disproportionate amount of black and brown communities getting fined or arrested, as we saw with marijuana.

Bolster our enemies overseas: The menthol cigarette ban will also create an illegal market, shifting sales and revenue away from innocent, law-abiding, tax-paying small businesses and hand Mexican cartels a new revenue source. They are involved in tobacco trafficking as we speak, profiting billions of dollars from this already. The U.S. government has already said that tobacco trafficking “Is a lucrative crime for terrorist groups used to finance acts of terror.”A ban will further cement this reality.

As we’ve seen in previous bans of this product, they do not move the needle in terms of helping users quit. After the menthol ban in Canada, 80% of menthol users hadn’t quit with many turning to alternative avenues of purchase. In Massachusetts, after the menthol ban went into effect, smoking levels did not go down, the black market thrived, small businesses lost thousands of customers and Massachusetts lost millions in tax revenue.

Prohibition simply does not work, unless you measure in revenue lost, taxes uncollected, and communities criminalized. We urge President Biden and the OMB to consider all of these unintended consequences and not finalize the rule to ban menthol cigarettes.