Cigarette Bill Treats Menthol With Leniency

By STEPHANIE SAUL, nytimes.com

Some public health experts are questioning why menthol, the most widely used cigarette flavoring and the most popular cigarette choice of African-American smokers, is receiving special protection as Congress tries to regulate tobacco for the first time.

The legislation, which would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to oversee tobacco products, would try to reduce smoking’s allure to young people by banning most flavored cigarettes, including clove and cinnamon.

But those new strictures would exempt menthol — even though menthol masks the harsh taste of cigarettes for beginners and may make it harder for the addicted to kick the smoking habit. For years, public health authorities have worried that menthol might be a factor in high cancer rates in African-Americans.

The reason menthol is seen as politically off limits, despite those concerns, is that mentholated brands are so crucial to the American cigarette industry. They make up more than one-fourth of the $70 billion American cigarette market and are becoming increasingly important to the industry leader, Philip Morris USA, without whose lobbying support the legislation might have no chance of passage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/business/13menthol.html">Complete article

This is something the government has no business in doing, certainly not the federal government. It's not that hard to make a clove cigarette, and I know many people who smoke them and nothing else, I don't know how, but they do.

If the federal government actually bans clove and flavored cigarettes, then I hope that someone comes up with a way to bring these things into the country and that a huge black market develops.

The government should be focusing on fixing the damned economy, not on trying to regulate our personal lives.

Bring on the drug sniffing dogs. Salem and Kool cigarettes cause young children to do Heroin. (The Govt has proof!) We need police officers in all the elementary schools. We'll have a program.. let's call it DARE (Dumb Ass Resoning Exsists) The problem starts with Caffeine.. before you know it the kids start having parties down at Starbucks. Then, sadly, you find empty Mountain Dew cans in their car. I say we need to expand the War on Drugs! How about people who use salt, MSG, curry powder or too much cinnamon? Yes,they are criminals. We have to fill those jail cells. "PRISON... the number one growth industry in America".

grow a mustache.