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As the massive garage door lifted to reveal the inside of the small warehouse where Minou Jones’ mother worked, the bulk packs of menthol cigarettes began to glisten. Here, where the gold containers were stacked sky-high in downtown Detroit, was the heart of Big Tobacco’s money making operation.
They’d market menthols, which were scientifically concocted to be easier to smoke and harder to quit, to America’s Black communities and recruit Jones’ family members and neighbors to do the work.
Their only job was to get rid of the supply. At the warehouse, her aunt would pack vans full of cigarette boxes and for $10 an hour, more than double minimum wage, others would pass out free samples across the city.
It was the 1980s, and menthol cigarettes’ wrath was proving to be more insidious than that of the crack epidemic storming the streets. As long as folks were off the hard drugs, residents thought all was well. It took years — and in many cases, decades — for the devastation from smoking menthols to strike.
Today, more than 80% of Black smokers opt for menthol products.
“It was masterful,” said Jones, reflecting on how Big Tobacco companies weaved their way into Black culture, posing as allies pouring money into the community only for their products to snatch loved ones’ lives decades later.
“They were just exploiting us,” she said.
Black folks tend to smoke fewer cigarettes and start at a later age than white Americans, but they’re more likely to die from smoking-related illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tobacco use also bleeds into heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Those are the three leading causes of death for Black Americans.
Jones wants the federal government to get rid of menthol cigarettes and flavored tobacco, a stance that’s divided some Black folks. After the Food and Drug Administration introduced a proposal to ban the products last year, health experts celebrated the win, but racial justice advocates pushed back.
What unraveled was not a battle between good or bad, best or better, but rather, a question of the most suitable among two deadly evils — a painful reminder of the danger that comes with being born Black in America.
Could the health benefits of a federal ban come at the risk of further criminalizing Black communities, some wondered. Could a ban increase the number of Black lives lost at the hands of law enforcement?
Earlier this fall, the FDA sent the final rules of the ban to the White House. The final stamp of approval was originally expected by the end of this year, but recently, news broke that, instead, the Biden administration is delaying into next year. It bothers Jones, and others who’ve lost loved ones, that it’s taking so long.
As officials weigh the consequences of such a move, pain lingers for those once targeted. For many Black families, the delays have already been deadly.
“Everybody smoked the menthols”
One week, Martha Hike’s father was working. The next, he fell ill. That weekend, he passed away. His death in September 1981 was the first ripple in the wave of lung cancer deaths that wrecked her family.
Six months later, her mother died on Valentine’s Day. Her husband passed away in 1993. Nearly 10 years passed before the next death struck, that of her sister in 2012. Then, two of her other siblings died just shy of a decade later.
All, to lung cancer. In between, there was congestive heart failure. COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Diabetes.
“Everybody smoked the menthols,” said Hike, who lives in Illinois. Her father was the only one who opted for Camels, and Hike remembers all the others saying they could never smoke the ones with no flavor like Dad did. The taste stung more than it soothed.
So, they stuck to their menthols, to mask the tobacco’s harshness. An illusion suggesting maybe they were safer than non-flavored products when, in reality, the consequences are just as severe, if not worse.
Maybe, Hike thinks, if menthol wasn’t there, if those cigarettes didn’t taste much sweeter than poison, a lot more people wouldn’t smoke.
“I know what it did to me and how it destroyed my family,” she said.
A federal ban on the products has been in consideration for years. In 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act banned flavors in cigarettes — except menthol. Some Black leaders and advocates say it has felt like Big Tobacco money is coming ahead of Black lives.
The morning after news outlets reported on an expected delay by the Biden administration, a group of leaders from national organizations shared their outrage on a media call. Why is menthol the only flavoring that’s not banned, they wondered.
“Put people’s health above politics or profit,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP.
He was one of many sharing the same message. And, they pushed back against the recent delay that is speculated to have been a political move, a tactic to maintain support for Biden among Black voters, who may also be menthol smokers, as the 2024 election approaches.
“It hurts the poorest of Black people,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II. “In the South, we’re the ones who are exploited.”
The National Medical Association, National Council of Negro Women, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, and the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council were also on the call.
Read more: A Nationwide Ban on Menthol Cigarettes Could Be Coming, and It’s Dividing Racial Justice Advocates
Many reports have been released outlining the enormous public health benefits of getting rid of menthol, including one that suggests such a move could prevent 92,000 to 238,000 deaths among Black Americans over 40 years.
“It takes years and years for that damage to show,” Dr. Jamie Rutland said.
After losing his grandfather, a menthol smoker, to emphysema, Rutland became a pulmonologist. It’s why he practices medicine, he said. He grew up around smoke. His mom smoked every day while she was pregnant with him.
He jokes that if she didn’t, maybe he’d be 6 inches taller and on a professional sports team’s roster. Instead, his lung collapsed after birth. Since, his mother-in-law has battled lung cancer, and lives with emphysema. During medical school, he started to learn the physiology of it all. How every breath around smokes fills your lungs with pollutants, causing irritation, and, in turn, deadly inflammation.
Flavoring the tobacco, he said, makes it easier to tolerate. Just like coffee. The sweetness of vanilla, mocha and caramel reel in the young folks. It’s pleasant enough to hook them and maybe, over time, black coffee becomes more intriguing.
Rutland’s excitement about the ban is stalled as the federal government delays. In the meantime, he’ll continue to treat those suffering menthol’s consequences.
“We know that smoking kills you,” he said. “We want less people to smoke.”
Black cities targeted
Still, some are unsettled by the idea of what the other side of a ban could bring. Will it affect how Black communities are policed?
In 2014, Eric Garner was killed during an encounter with New York City police when they accused him of illegally selling loose cigarettes. Since then, his mother, Gwen Carr, has spoken out about banning menthol cigarettes.
She worries it will give “police officers another excuse to harass and harm any Black man, woman, or child they choose.” Carr is among a number of folks, particularly criminal justice reform and drug policy groups, who fear making the products illegal will give police more opportunities to detain Black Americans, who are already overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
They’re concerned an illicit market could arise, and a crackdown on the manufacturing and sale of the products would fall on Black Americans.
“A bad law has consequences for a mother like me,” Carr said.
Along with her, the ACLU, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice are among those who’ve publicly opposed the ban. Some have also accepted Big Tobacco money at various points in time.
The manufacturers’ tactic of connecting with prominent Black leaders and getting them to oppose a ban publicly made headlines in the summer of 2022.
Shortly after the Rev. Horace Sheffield, a Black pastor in Detroit, penned an editorial supporting the ban, writing that it would “stem the tide of preventable disease and death,” he says he received some texts and a phone call from R.J. Reynolds, an American tobacco company.
The representative offered $250,000 for Sheffield to switch his stance and oppose a menthol ban.
At the time, he told reporters, “I felt as if my entire ethical constitution was being challenged. I felt as if I was being asked to do something that was completely against the grain of who I am and what I stood for.”
R.J. Reynolds, the company, has a track record of targeting Black folks.
According to a 1992 report by The Times of London, one of their executives replied, “We don’t smoke that shit. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the Black and stupid,” when asked why industry leaders didn’t smoke.
And sell, they did.
Often, advertisements in Ebony and Jet featured Black models or celebrities selling sophistication, luxury, and success. The tobacco companies offered grants to historically Black colleges and universities. They sponsored hip-hop and jazz music festivals, and supported civil rights institutions, including the NAACP. The percentage of menthol smokers who were Black skyrocketed from 5% in the 1950s to over 80% in the 2000s.
In the 1980s, the free sample program that Jones watched unfold in Detroit began in Houston, then expanded to 50 cities nationwide.
“A total of 1.9M samples will be distributed to targeted smokers in 1983,” industry officials wrote in a Kool Market Development Program document. “Sample distribution will be targeted to: housing projects, clubs, community organizations and events where Kool’s Black young adult target congregate.”
As a potential ban hangs in the balance, public support for and against the ban has ramped up.
Tobacco companies would love nothing more than Black folks arguing over this, said Jones, who, after seeing her community decimated by smoking, now works with the Detroit Tobacco Free Coalition. It takes the focus off the real issue, she said, which is the government and Big Tobacco not protecting Americans.
“We don’t have to die in the numbers that we have died from cancer,” she said.
Jones’ heart aches for her grandmother; the once glamorous woman who walked in high heels was met with a battle against emphysema. She struggled to breath until the day she died. After she passed, the deaths in Jones’ life piled on.
Her aunt “literally smoked herself to death” as she describes it.
Her best friend struggled with addiction. Over the years, she kicked crack and heroin addictions and overcame alcoholism. But, she couldn’t successfully quit menthol smoking. She died of breast cancer, leaving behind her 13-year-old daughter.
In the fall of 2022, Jones lost her father. Before her eyes, he transformed from a strong man working in an automobile plant who’d walk miles around the neighborhood with her to make sure she knew how to navigate the streets, to a man so frail, he’d gasp for air.
Her mother, who lives with her now, quit Newports after a stent was placed in her heart.
“It all still hurts me.”
Correction: This story was been updated to reflect that Dr. Jamie Rutland’s mother-in-law has battled lung cancer and lives with emphysema.