U.S. manufacturers urged to quit menthol

The U.S.-based Citizens’ Commission to Protect the Truth is urging Lorillard, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and Philip Morris USA immediately to stop marketing and selling menthol cigarettes, according to a PR Newswire story.

The commission is described as a group of all “living” former U.S. secretaries of health, education and welfare; U.S. secretaries of health and human services; U.S. surgeons general; and directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from every administration, Republican and Democrat, since that of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In a joint statement the former cabinet officers called menthol “the spoonful of sugar that makes the deadly medicine these companies are selling go down.”

And in letters to these tobacco companies’ chief executives, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr. and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan, M.D., chair and vice chair, respectively, of the commission, said such action was imperative to avoid encouraging children and teens to start and continue smoking and to avoid the devastating impact of menthol cigarettes on the African-American community.

At the same time, the commission called upon the Obama Administration to allow the Food and Drug Administration to act on its Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee’s 3-year-old recommendation “that the FDA ban menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes based on the distinguished Committee’s finding that removal of menthol cigarettes from the market would benefit the public health.”