At the end of April, the Food and Drug Administration announced its plans to ban menthol cigarettes, the last form of flavored cigarette allowed in the United States. This step will likely go into effect next year. “I was obviously very thrilled to see the FDA stepping up and announcing that they were going to put this policy into place,” says Shyanika Rose, a commercial tobacco control and health equity researcher at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. “It's something we've been doing research to support and advocating for for quite a long time.”
Advocates of menthol cigarette bans think that eliminating the flavoring will reduce the number of new smokers and push current smokers to quit, particularly among those disproportionately impacted by these cigarettes, like Black smokers. And what experts anticipate as a result of the ban isn’t just a hope — it’s a prediction, based on evidence gathered in the U.S. and abroad.
