A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel urged a ban on menthol cigarettes because they believe a ban would be beneficial to public health.

Research done by the Tobacco Product Scientific Advisory Committee over the past year has concluded that menthol makes cigarettes more enticing for youths and African Americans, thus making it harder for these groups to quit smoking.

Menthol is an active pharmaceutical ingredient that can be found in throat lozenges and cold and cough medicines. The amount of menthol in medicine is regulated by the FDA, but before this study the amount of menthol in tobacco products was not being regulated.  

The TPSAC is the newest part of the FDA. While the TPSAC does not set FDA policy or actions, it does give information that the agency will take into account when considering this ban on menthol cigarettes.

The TPSAC was formed after new acts, which went into effect in June 2009, gave the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco products.

“It allows us, the FDA, to take that information and develop public health education programs and campaigns targeted to both kids as well as adult users, so that they will understand the dangers of tobacco use,” said Lawrence Deyton, the director of the FDA Center for Tobacco Products, said in a recent interview posted on the FDA’s YouTube channel.

The American Wholesale Marketers Association is one organization speaking out against the ban on menthol cigarettes. The organization does not believe that the TPSAC has enough evidence to endorse the ban.

“Common sense tells us that a decision that lacks credibility will be disregarded by the public and exploited by black market operators.

The end result will adversely affect our members’ livelihoods, cost jobs, and lead to sales of unregulated cigarettes to underage youths,” AWMA president Bill Marshall said in a statement to the advisory committee.

However, according to the preliminary report, the TPSAC firmly believes in what they call “evidence based decision making” and disagrees with the views of the AWMA, stating that they do in fact have enough evidence to make a decision.

   Throughout about a year of research and studies, the TPSAC found that African Americans and adolescents were the most likely to smoke menthol cigarettes. The TPSAC believes that this could have something to do with how tobacco companies market menthol cigarettes.

The TPSAC had access to some internal tobacco industry documents, and after studying these documents the committee concluded that tobacco companies were aware of the appeal of menthol cigarettes to younger smokers because these cigarettes are supposedly easier to smoke. The TPSAC also found that adolescents that smoked menthol cigarettes had a harder time quitting as opposed to youths that smoked regular cigarettes.

The advisory committee believes that menthol cigarettes make tobacco use more attractive to people, which is part of the reason why they feel menthol cigarettes are detrimental to public health.

“Certainly consumption of tobacco in this country is the leading preventable cause of disease and death. It causes almost half a million deaths a year,” Deyton said in the same interview.

The TPSAC recently released its preliminary report, which is available to the public on the FDA’s website. The final report will be released by March 23.

“I think we all know we’ve won the battle that the public knows that tobacco is dangerous, but most people don’t know how dangerous it is to them and certainly to those people around them,” Deyton said.