A coalition of religious, government and educational leaders came together Friday morning to bring attention to the dangers of menthol-flavored tobacco products and to urge the public to avoid using such products this coming Sunday.
Katherine Donald, executive director of the Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas, told an audience of about 20 who had gathered at the downtown plaza that tobacco products were deadly.
"Tobacco is still the No. 1 killer of African Americans," Donald said. "If you think about murder, suicide, accidents, HIV/AIDS , if you count all of those things, tobacco kills more people every year."
"No Menthol Sunday," as it is being called, is a day that is observed internationally to raise awareness of menthol cigarettes and tobacco products. The event is being led by The Center for Black Health and Equity, an organization whose goal is to promote health programs and services for people of African descent, according to its website.
Donald was followed by several other speakers who said menthol-flavored tobacco products were aimed at young people and African Americans and that the flavoring made it easier to start using such products and harder to quit.
Joe Brown, who is an elder at Holy Temple Church Cathedral in Little Rock and calls himself "the stamp out smoking man," said that 85% of African Americans who use tobacco use menthol-flavored tobacco. He said people remember the menthol that was used in a rub as a home remedy for breathing problems and that the tobacco industry continues to use the flavor "as a way to mask the harshness of tobacco."
"I call on all churches to educate and eradicate menthol-flavored tobacco products," he said.
Pebbles Fagan, professor and director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco in the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said menthol-flavored tobacco products should have been banned in the 2009 Tobacco Control Act.
"We should protect our children from this harm in the same way we are protecting our children from covid-19," Fagan said, adding that tobacco purchases were particularly harmful in an economic sense because money spent on tobacco in poor households added to a family's food insecurity.
State Rep. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) said she was a bit in shock because she thought African American and other communities were making progress against the use of menthol-flavored tobacco products. After listening in on a Zoom meeting Thursday, she realized otherwise.
"We're not doing good," she said. "We're not OK."
Flowers said internal documents, which were made public in the 1990s, quoted a tobacco executive who was asked if he smoked his own company's cigarettes. "He said, 'I don't smoke this s* * *; we just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the Black, the poor and the stupid,'" Flowers said, quoting the documents.
Flowers called the current laws that allow menthol flavor to continue to be added to tobacco products as "patently racist, patently unhealthy and patently wrong," adding that the current regulations that allow such products are similar to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which adult males with syphilis were studied without their knowledge.
"This is what injustice looks like in the 21st century," said Flowers, who urged her listeners to make themselves aware of the issue and to become "town criers" as they contacted elected officials and asked for changes in the law.
African Americans are not the only population tobacco companies are marketing to, Flowers said, "but we're just targeted the worst."
"Everyone has a role to do," she said. "Now let's go do it."
A change in the regulation is, perhaps, not far away. In late April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it is committed to creating new regulations that would ban menthol as a tobacco flavor in cigarettes and cigars.
"Banning menthol--the last allowable flavor--in cigarettes and banning all flavors in cigars will help save lives, particularly among those disproportionately affected by these deadly products," said Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, according to the FDA website. "With these actions, the FDA will help significantly reduce youth initiation, increase the chances of smoking cessation among current smokers, and address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products. Together, these actions represent powerful, science-based approaches that will have an extraordinary public health impact. Armed with strong scientific evidence, and with full support from the Administration, we believe these actions will launch us on a trajectory toward ending tobacco-related disease and death in the U.S."
Several local pastors also spoke at the event and said they would talk to their congregations this Sunday about avoiding menthol-flavored tobacco products as well as avoiding all tobacco products in general.