The industry has strategically and aggressively targeted the Black community with menthol cigarettes for decades, including placing more advertising in predominantly Black neighborhoods and in publications that are popular with Black audiences, as well as appropriating culture in marketing, including sponsoring events such as jazz and hip-hop festivals. Today, nearly 9 in 10 Black smokers use menthol cigarettes. Tobacco companies have also targeted the African American community with flavored cigars. African American youth have the highest rates of cigar smoking.
“The truth is that menthol cigarettes and the death of Mr. Garner are linked by his plaintive cry of ‘I can’t breathe,’ part of a long history of systemic targeting of Black people,” wrote Keith Wailoo, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, in an op-ed for The New York Times. “The story of Big Tobacco and menthol is a rolling tragedy where the violence occurs off camera. It is a slower extraction of health and wealth, playing out not over minutes but decades and generations. But make no mistake, menthol cigarette smoking often leads to decimated lungs, emphysema, cancer and a range of other ailments, ending too often in a tragic plea for air.”
Black smokers have a harder time quitting smoking and die at higher rates from tobacco-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke. The FDA has stated that “324,000 to 654,000 smoking attributable deaths overall (92,000 to 283,000 among African Americans) would be avoided over the course of 40 years.”