Menthol trickery

Here’s a deeply researched and deeply disturbing book: Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), by Princeton historian Keith Wailoo. Wailoo begins with Dave Chappelle’s question: “Why do black people love menthols so much?” The joke answer, of course: “Nobody knows.” But tobacco companies and advertising consultants know.

An excerpt:

As I looked closely into the industry’s menthol project, I came to understand that menthol’s history is layered with trickery that takes one’s breath away — both figuratively and literally. I also came to see menthol’s ascent as exemplary of the broader story of racial capitalism in America. That is, it is a story of race and the economy of cities, of the racial profits to be made in the smoking business, and about the devices created for extracting wealth from Black communities even as they also extracted health from Black bodies. The business tactics that helped companies develop Black menthol markets were not specific to African Americans. Yet the industry’s commitment to understanding the African American social condition (in order to shape smoking preferences) is at once fascinating and frightening. If their studies of Black life had been done for any other purposes than for the selling of tobacco products, the depth of thought devoted to understanding race, the city, and society might be admirable. They studied the difficulties that Black people in cities confronted. They looked closely at the challenges of poverty, drug use, residential segregation, and urban decline — doing so to a remarkable degree. Big Tobacco’s interest in these issues was not focused on ameliorating social ills, however. Their brand of racial capitalism looked at urban distress and social vulnerability in search of opportunity. With greater social adversity came the capacity for greater profits.

Three details to illustrate the shamelessness of the effort to sell menthol to Black communities:

~ In 1971 advertising consultants suggested to Liggett a new menthol brand to appeal to Black people in the “drug culture.” It was to be called Halfway, which the consultants said was meant to suggest “a half-way house toward marijuana and heroin.”

~ In 1976 a Lorillard executive floated the name Cole for a new menthol brand, meant to suggest Nat King Cole: “I believe the name COLE (if not already registered) would be immediately accepted by the Blacks.” The executive seems not to have known that Cole smoked three packs a day and died of lung cancer.

~ And in 1990 R.J. Reynolds was forced to scrap plans for the menthol brand Uptown.

In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Wailoo offered a short version of the book’s argument: “How the Tobacco Industry Hooked Black Smokers on Menthols.”