How the tobacco industry conspired with conservative activists to kill the Biden administration’s proposed ban on menthol cigarettes 

When the FDA proposed banning menthol cigarettes in 2022, it was buried under 175,000 public comments — and nearly all of them were copy-and-paste jobs. As Jason McLure reports for STAT News, a new Rutgers University analysis found 97% were form letters opposing the ban, and nearly half matched campaigns run by tobacco giants Altria and Reynolds American.

Just 2% of the letters were unique, according to the study, published in JAMA Network Open. Most recycled industry talking points — that smoking menthols is “a matter of adult choice,” or that a ban would “increase crime, reduce tax revenues, and hurt small businesses” — while largely ignoring health.

Flooding regulators with identical letters is an old tobacco trick, and it rarely works. Agencies weigh substance, not volume, said Steven Balla, co-director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University: “the agency’s response will mostly be to the handful that are substantive.”

This time, it seems to have worked. The FDA blew deadlines in 2023 and 2024 as the ban collided with President Biden’s re-election push and his need for Black voters’ support — about 80% of Black smokers use menthols. In April 2024, the administration shelved the rule, citing an “immense amount of feedback.” It was formally scrapped after President Trump took office.

The stakes are considerable. Menthols caused an estimated 157,000 smoking-related deaths among Black Americans between 1980 and 2018, and research suggests a ban could avert 650,000 early deaths over four decades.

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“They sent in 250,000 letters and our organization sent in one,” said Phillip Gardiner, co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. “How do you counter that?”

Eric Lindblom, a former senior official at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products now at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute, called the claim that officials needed more time “absolute nonsense.” As he put it: “Nobody’s going to come out and say, ‘We’re not going to issue this rule because it’s going to hurt us in the election.’”

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