Black Smokers' Lives Matter

Don't lets allow Al Sharpton to kill a life-saving ban on menthol cigarettes. Also, thoughts on GDP, wages, consumer spending, and the R word (recession).

The Food and Drug Administration has proposed a ban on menthol-flavored cigarettes. Congress banned flavored cigarettes 13 years ago, but it exempted menthols because members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which in those days was taking a lot of tobacco money, insisted. (Fully 85 percent of Black cigarette smokers smoke menthols, which since the 1950s have been marketed aggressively to African Americans.) It’s not a pretty story. But now the cigarette companies have lost much of their influence over the CBC and other groups representing African Americans, no doubt because defending menthol cigarettes is impossible to square with the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” Tens of thousands of Black lives are lost each year to smoking.

A lonely holdout among civil rights leaders is Al Sharpton, whose organization takes money from R.J. Reynolds. Sharpton is pretty shamelessly arguing that a ban on menthol cigarettes will mean more police harassment of African Americans, even though the proposed ban makes clear that possession of menthol cigarettes will remain perfectly legal; what’s being banned is the manufacture and marketing of menthol cigarettes. That’s the subject of one of three New Republic pieces I posted this week. You can read it here.

I should add that it was a pleasure to see that the Washington Post’s Laurie McGinley, with whom I covered the cigarette wars back in the mid-1990s—when we were both at the Wall Street Journal and giants roamed the earth—wrote one of the better spot-news stories on the FDA’s proposed regulation. Hi, Laurie! Plus ça change, non?

My other two pieces this week were about the economy. One argued that even though inflation is too high, wages are still too low. Believe it or not, from the start of the pandemic through 2021, labor’s share of corporate income actually fell. You can read that piece here. My other piece said it’s time to start talking about the R word (recession), but that the latest economic numbers are too screwy to know whether we’re going to get one or not. You can read that piece here.