When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars in 2022, nearly 250,000 public comments flooded in – a record response that led the administration of President Joe Biden to delay a final decision.
But a Rutgers Health analysis shows that a minority came from concerned individuals inspired to speak out about the proposed ban in their own words.
The study in JAMA Network Open examined all 246,808 comments submitted to FDA dockets and found that 97% of comments on the menthol rule and 93% on the cigar rule were form letters. Roughly 46% of the menthol form letters contained content traceable to tobacco companies, including Reynolds American Inc.'s "Own It, Voice It" campaign and Altria Group Inc.'s "Voices for Consumer Choice" campaign. Two percent of all comments were unique.
"The sheer volume of comments was used as a reason to delay a public health policy that would have saved lives," said Andrea Villanti , professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health , deputy director of the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies and lead author of the study. "What wasn't considered was how few of those submissions were unique or how much tobacco company influence had shaped both the volume and the content of the comments."
The researchers downloaded the publicly available comments and used statistical software to identify recurring phrases, ultimately matching submissions to 17 distinct form-letter templates. After removing form letters and near-duplicates, they analyzed the remaining 3,342 unique menthol comments and 1,432 unique cigar comments.
Even among unique comments, 96% opposed the menthol ban, and 99% opposed the cigar ban. But the leading arguments were economic: loss of revenue and sales, fears of an illicit market and claims that education would work better than prohibition. Few unique comments (3-5%) addressed the health evidence behind the rules.
The study is part of an ongoing Rutgers project examining how disinformation shaped the debate over menthol and flavored tobacco policies, work that has traced industry arguments from their origins to their effects.
An earlier study in the project, led by Ollie Ganz , an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, analyzed direct-to-consumer emails that tobacco companies sent customers during the comment period. The emails urged recipients to "take action" and steered them to company-run websites that assembled personalized antiban letters from menus of prewritten arguments, then submitted them to the FDA.
Another study in the project, led by Olivia Wackowski , a professor at the School of Public Health, analyzed 122 news articles about the menthol rule and found that press coverage presented a more balanced picture: Seventy-five percent of articles cited the ban's potential to reduce disease and save lives, while opposition arguments centered on concerns about increased policing in Black communities.
The policing argument invoked the 2014 death of Eric Garner, which came at the hands of New York police who were trying to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes. Villanti said this argument is designed to mislead the public because FDA product standards regulate what tobacco companies can manufacture and sell, not individual purchase or use of these products.
"Taken together, these findings show how the tobacco industry influence can shape policy debates in ways that obscure scientific evidence and distort perceptions of public opinion," said Kymberle Sterling, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-author of the new study. "As a result, Black communities and other populations disproportionately targeted by the marketing of menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars continue to bear an unequal burden of tobacco-related harms when evidence-based protections are delayed, weakened, or withdrawn."
Menthol cigarettes account for more than a third of the U.S. cigarette market and a majority of the cigarettes smoked by Black Americans, and researchers have estimated they caused 378,000 premature deaths in the United States between 1980 and 2018. Menthol anesthetizes the throat, making smoke easier to inhale for first-time smokers; studies show that the products are also more difficult to quit, especially for Black Americans.
The FDA sent final rules to the White House for review in 2023, but the Biden administration postponed action in April 2024, and the rules were withdrawn in January 2025.
"FDA's rules on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars are science-based policies designed to protect public health," Villanti said. "One in five deaths in the U.S. is still attributable to tobacco smoking, and lack of action on these policies will have lasting impacts on the lives of American people and communities."
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01MD018728. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
