Moral challenge laid down

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH US) has said that it is time to phase cigarettes out of the US market.
In a press note issued yesterday, the day on which the US Food and Drug Administration announced crackdowns on various tobacco and nicotine-delivery products, ASH focused on the announcement by the FDA Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, MD, that he intended to begin the process of banning the sale of menthol cigarettes.
‘Menthol was left out of a cigarette-flavoring ban in 2009, and the result is that African Americans smoke menthol cigarettes at a much higher rate – and suffer the consequences – than the general population,’ the note said. ‘But it’s long past time to think about doing away with cigarettes altogether. As Stanford University’s Robert Proctor put it in his book Golden Holocaust, “the cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization”.’
ASH went on to say that the addition of menthol made the first cigarette a person smoked easier on the throat, which made inhaling easier and increased nicotine addiction.
It said that menthol brands had been heavily marketed to African Americans, resulting in nearly nine out of 10 African American smokers using menthol cigarettes.
And it said that cigarettes generally still caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the US annually, over 1/5th of all deaths.
‘As a society, we have become numb to the harm caused by cigarettes, thanks largely to a century-long tobacco-industry public relations campaign to normalize smoking,’ the note said. ‘But take a step back, and imagine a new product coming on the market tomorrow that is highly addictive and deadly when used as intended. It would be removed from the shelves immediately.
‘Ask yourself another question: at what age do I want my kids to start smoking? The answer for nearly everyone is obviously “never”. Most smokers want to quit and wish they had never started. Nearly all made the “choice” to smoke that first cigarette as children; by adulthood, they were already addicted.’
Laurent Huber, executive director of ASH, was quoted as saying that the mass marketing of cigarettes, a highly sophisticated, addictive and defective nicotine delivery device that killed over seven million people globally every year, was an abuse of corporate power and a human rights violation. “Banning menthol is a step in the right direction, but it is time to go one step further and phase cigarettes out of the market to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths,” Huber said.
ASH said the FDA was precluded from banning tobacco sales when it was given authority over tobacco products. ‘But all the states and many local jurisdictions are empowered to end the sale of cigarettes and protect the lives of their citizens,’ the note said. ‘Such a move was politically impossible when we first learned of the health harms caused by smoking – about half of adults smoked. But we’ve made progress in the past 50 years, and driven that figure down to about 14 percent.
“It’s now within reach,” Huber said. “With the stroke of a pen, communities can end the number one preventable cause of death and disease.”