How Big Tobacco and Conservative Operatives Buried the Menthol Cigarette Ban Under a Mountain of Fake Grassroots Support
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration opened its public comment period on a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes in 2022, the response looked, on the surface, like a democratic groundswell. Nearly a quarter-million Americans, it seemed, had strong opinions about mint-flavored tobacco — and most of them were against the ban. The Biden White House, already nervous about its standing with Black voters heading into a brutal election year, pointed to that "immense amount of feedback" as justification for shelving the rule entirely. The ban never happened. And now, a rigorous academic study has documented exactly how the tobacco industry manufactured that groundswell from thin air.
A study published 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. "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 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 implications reach far beyond a single regulatory fight over cigarettes. This is a story about how legacy industries exploit the machinery of American democracy — specifically the federal notice-and-comment rulemaking process — to kill public health policy. It's a story about dark-money conservative groups, tobacco industry front campaigns with names that sound like citizen movements, and a White House that flinched when it should have held firm. And it's a story that cost lives.
The Scope of the Deception: 97 Percent Form Letters
After the FDA drafted language to outlaw the manufacture of mint-flavored cigarettes in 2022, it asked for public comments — and was hit with an avalanche of 175,000 messages over three months. To the uninitiated, that number signals massive public engagement. To researchers at Rutgers University, it signaled something else entirely.
Of those comments, 97% were form letters opposing the ban, according to the new study. Nearly half of the letters had the same language as campaigns run by tobacco giants Altria Group Inc. or Reynolds American. Most of the rest echoed industry talking points. Just 2% of the letters were unique.
The industry's fingerprints were traceable right down to the campaign branding. Roughly 46% of the menthol form letters contained content traceable to tobacco companies, including Reynolds American's "Own It, Voice It" campaign and Altria Group's "Voices for Consumer Choice" campaign. The researchers found that 46% of the comments included content from tobacco companies, including RAI Services' Own It Voice It (32%) and Altria's Marlboro (12%). Employees of tobacco giants ITG Brands or Universal Leaf submitted an additional 595 comments.
Most comments recycled industry talking points — that smoking menthols is "a matter of adult choice," or that a ban would "increase crime, reduce tax revenues, and hurt small businesses" — while largely ignoring health. Among the unique comments analyzed, 96% opposed the menthol ban, primarily citing economic concerns such as revenue loss and the potential for illicit markets. Researchers noted that only 3% to 5% of these unique comments discussed the health evidence supporting the regulations.
How the Machinery Worked: Direct-to-Consumer Astroturfing
The logistics of generating that flood of letters are worth understanding, because they reveal the sophistication of the operation. An earlier study in the Rutgers 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 anti-ban letters from menus of prewritten arguments, then submitted them to the FDA.
In other words, a tobacco customer who received one of these emails didn't need to write a single word. They clicked a link, perhaps checked a box for which pre-written arguments they liked best, and the company's website generated a "personalized" opposition letter in their name and submitted it directly to the federal docket. From the outside, it looked like one more concerned citizen speaking up. From the inside, it was an assembly line producing counterfeit democracy at industrial scale.
The tactic of showering regulators with the same talking points is not new. The tobacco industry has done it since at least the 1980s, when it bombarded a federal agency with letters opposing airline smoking restrictions. Nor is it limited to cigarettes: When the Federal Communications Commission considered "net neutrality" rules in 2017, one college student filed more than 7.7 million comments.
Regulatory experts were not surprised that the volume itself held little legal weight. Flooding regulators with identical letters is an old tobacco trick, and it rarely works. Agencies weigh substance, not volume, said Steven Balla, co-director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University: "the agency's response will mostly be to the handful that are substantive." The troubling twist in the menthol case is that the volume didn't need to change regulatory law — it only needed to change political calculation. And on that front, it succeeded spectacularly.
The Political Dimension: An Election-Year Calculation
By the time the FDA's public health concerns about menthol cigarettes reached their peak, which make up more than a third of all cigarettes sold in the U.S., they had run head-on into efforts to get President Joe Biden re-elected. He needed the support of Black Americans, a key market for menthol cigarettes.
More than 11% of U.S. adults smoke, with rates roughly even between white and Black people. But about 80% of Black smokers smoke menthol, which the FDA says masks the harshness of smoking, making it easier to start and harder to quit. Most teenagers who smoke cigarettes also smoke menthols. Those demographic realities made the menthol ban politically combustible in a way few regulatory proposals ever become.
Once the ban was first suggested in April 2022, it polled as widely unpopular in several swing states, including Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada. Republican strategists took notice immediately. During the election, the possibility of a menthol ban became a talking point in Republican messaging. The conservative nonprofit group Building America's Future set aside millions for ads criticizing the ban, which primarily targeted Black voters in swing states. One warned that Democrats are "coming after your menthol cigarettes."
A Republican strategist told CNN that an organization calling itself Liberty Policy Foundation launched an ad campaign critical of the proposed menthol ban and accused Biden of trying to "criminalize" menthol cigarettes — and, implicitly, the Black people who smoke them. The framing was deliberately incendiary. Among the groups meeting with the White House were law enforcement and civil rights organizations that had received money from the tobacco industry and opposed the ban over concerns it would lead to illicit sales and biased policing.
Civil Rights Groups as Industry Proxies
Perhaps the most uncomfortable dimension of this story is the role of civil rights and law enforcement organizations — some with sterling reputations — that found themselves carrying water for the tobacco industry. The White House held dozens of meetings in recent months with groups opposing the ban, including civil rights organizers, law enforcement officials and small business owners. Most of those groups had financial ties to tobacco companies.
The Law Enforcement Action Partnership wrote in April that "banning the legal sale of menthol cigarettes through licensed businesses will lead to illegal, unlicensed distribution in communities of color, trigger criminal laws in all 50 states, increase the incidence of negative interactions with police, and ultimately increase incarceration rates." The argument is emotionally resonant in the post-George Floyd era. But public health researchers pushed back hard on the premise.
Another argument from tobacco-aligned groups is that outlawing menthol would create an illicit market and increase criminal activities. More than 100 U.S. cities and counties have already restricted menthol products, with few indications of a burgeoning illicit market. "Overpolicing is a very serious issue for Black and other communities, and the tobacco industry should not be using this serious issue to advance their own policy agenda," said one University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher.
Groups representing minorities, like the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement and the nonprofit National Action Network — the latter of which was founded by civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton — argued that banning menthol cigarettes while not restricting non-menthol cigarettes "puts a microscope on minority communities." The argument draws a kind of selective logic: rather than pointing out that all cigarettes should eventually face tighter regulation, it uses the selective nature of the menthol ban as a reason to oppose any regulation at all.
Other groups, including Americans for Tax Reform, warned of lost government revenue, citing one estimate that federal and state budgets would lose $6.6 billion in cigarette sales taxes. That group, led by conservative activist Grover Norquist, has received funding from Altria, the nation's largest cigarette maker. The financial connections between these advocacy organizations and the companies whose products they were defending were rarely disclosed in the public-facing campaigns.
A Decades-Long Strategy: How the Industry Built Its Infrastructure
The menthol battle didn't materialize from nowhere. The tobacco industry has spent decades cultivating exactly the kind of community relationships and political networks it needed to make this fight winnable.
The tobacco industry has cultivated the appeal of menthols in the Black community for decades. Starting in the 1960s, Brown & Williamson and rival tobacco companies used tactics like sponsoring jazz festivals, advertising in magazines like Ebony and distributing free samples to Black residents and even children. The industry also built ties with Black leaders by donating to civil rights groups and Black politicians.
Research has also shown that advertisements and promotions for menthol cigarettes in stores selling tobacco products are more common in neighborhoods with a greater share of Black residents. The geographic concentration of menthol marketing in predominantly Black neighborhoods wasn't accidental — it was strategic. And by the time the FDA proposed its ban sixty years later, the industry had successfully reframed its predatory marketing as cultural identity and consumer rights.
Anti-smoking advocates had been pushing the FDA to eliminate the flavor since the agency gained authority to regulate certain tobacco ingredients in 2009. Menthol is the only cigarette flavor that wasn't banned under that law, a carveout negotiated by industry allies in Congress. But the law instructed the FDA to continue studying the issue. For over a decade, that carveout held, and menthol sailed on as the tobacco industry's most protected product category.
What Menthol Actually Does — and Why It Matters
The proposed rule would have banned manufacturers from using the menthol compound, which cools and numbs the throat and airway, making cigarette smoke less harsh. Research has shown that menthols are more likely to addict young smokers and that a ban could avert 650,000 early deaths over four decades. The pharmacological effect is significant: by reducing the sensation of harshness, menthol essentially removes one of the body's primary warning signals that it's being harmed. Young smokers find it easier to start. Established smokers find it harder to quit.
Menthols caused an estimated 157,000 smoking-related deaths among Black Americans between 1980 and 2018, and research suggests a ban could avert 650,000 early deaths over four decades. Those aren't abstract projections. They represent grandfathers who don't live to see grandchildren graduate, fathers lost in their fifties, men in the prime of their productive years. The death toll from menthol cigarettes among Black Americans alone exceeds the total U.S. combat deaths in the Vietnam, Korean, and Gulf Wars combined.
The Collapse: How the Ban Died
The FDA blew deadlines in 2023 and 2024 as the ban collided with President Biden's re-election push and his need for Black voters' support. In April 2024, the administration shelved the rule, citing an "immense amount of feedback." It was formally scrapped after President Trump took office.
The Biden administration indefinitely postponed the ban, citing the vast public response — one that the Rutgers study concluded were nearly all form letters. "This rule has garnered historic attention and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback," said Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services at the time. "It's clear that there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time."
The irony is corrosive. The very mechanism that the Biden White House cited as the reason to pause — overwhelming public feedback — was, as Rutgers researchers later documented, almost entirely a product of industry manipulation. "Taken together, these findings show how 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."
Thomas Carr, the American Lung Association's director of national policy, put it bluntly: "We're really disappointed in former President Biden and him bowing to tobacco industry pressure." In its annual "State of Tobacco Control" report, the American Lung Association said Biden's inaction will result in continued death and disease from smoking, which kills more than 490,000 people each year in the U.S. The report describes Biden's failure to finalize the menthol ban as a glaring example of the tobacco industry "taking more aggressive actions at the federal and state level to protect its profits."
NAACP President Derrick Johnson framed it in starker terms: "Today's news from the Biden Administration is a blow to the Black community, who continue to be unfairly targeted and unjustly killed by Big Tobacco."
The Voice of Public Health Advocates Left Unheard
The sheer asymmetry of the comment campaign is perhaps best captured in a single observation from the field. Phillip Gardiner, co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, said of the industry's flood of letters: "They sent in 250,000 letters and our organization sent in one." His unspoken follow-up is obvious — how do you counter that? — and it goes to the heart of what the Rutgers study reveals about the vulnerability of American regulatory democracy to organized, well-funded disinformation campaigns.
Several organizations lobbied against a menthol cigarette ban, arguing that it would disproportionately impact people and communities of color, trigger criminal penalties and lead to negative interactions with law enforcement. Led by the American Civil Liberties Union, a coalition of 27 organizations said in a 2021 letter that a ban "is a policy disaster waiting to happen, with Black and other communities of color bearing the brunt." Meanwhile, the NAACP urged the Biden administration to move ahead with the menthol ban, saying that failing to do so "would be discriminatory and counter the goal and function of the FDA." The civil rights community was fractured, and the tobacco industry understood exactly how to exploit that fracture.
"It's heartbreaking," said Emily Holubowich, the American Heart Association's national senior vice president of federal advocacy. "We know these products kill." Public health professionals watched deadline after deadline slip. "It is incredibly frustrating as a person who is dedicated to public health and to health equity to see something like this continually be delayed," said Dr. Avenel Joseph, the vice president of policy at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The Rulemaking System Itself: A Vulnerability Exposed
The menthol episode should be read not just as a tobacco industry story but as a stress test of federal regulatory infrastructure. The notice-and-comment process enshrined in the Administrative Procedure Act is designed to give the public a genuine voice in the rules that govern their lives. What the Rutgers research documents is how comprehensively that process can be captured when a sufficiently motivated and well-resourced industry decides to game it.
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. The project represents exactly the kind of academic forensics that regulatory reform will require if agencies are going to harden their processes against this kind of manipulation.
The question of what comes next for menthol regulation is genuinely uncertain. 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. With the Trump administration in power, any regulatory action to revive the menthol ban is essentially off the table for the foreseeable future. The tobacco industry has, for now, won completely.
What the Rutgers study gives public health advocates is something arguably more durable than a single regulation: documented proof of the mechanism. A Rutgers Health analysis found that Big Tobacco used organized campaigns to flood the FDA with form letters, a tactic that contributed to the stalling of a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, examined 246,808 public comments and revealed that 97% of comments on the menthol rule and 93% on the cigar rule were form letters. That's a data point that future administrations, future Congresses, and future FDA commissioners will not easily be able to ignore.
What It Means Going Forward
The failure of the menthol ban is a case study in the convergence of industry money, political fear, and regulatory weakness. Tobacco companies didn't need to win the science argument — they lost that decisively. They didn't need to win the public health argument — they lost that too. They needed only to exploit two levers: the structural vulnerability of the public comment system, and the political anxiety of an incumbent president who needed Black voters in swing states more than he needed a public health legacy on tobacco.
The conservative activist infrastructure that amplified the industry's messaging — the Liberty Policy Foundation ads, the Building America's Future PAC's millions in swing-state buys, the network of think tanks with undisclosed industry funding — didn't need to persuade anyone that menthol cigarettes are safe. They needed only to make the ban politically costly enough that a risk-averse White House would blink. It worked.
Rep. Robin Kelly, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust, criticized the FDA for choosing to "abandon" the menthol ban, saying: "The FDA's experts have been clear that menthol cigarettes are harmful to public health. This is a commonsense plan which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives." Those words now sit in the congressional record alongside the Rutgers data, waiting for a political window that does not yet exist.
For American men who smoke — who make up the majority of tobacco consumers in this country — the menthol saga is a reminder of how little the industry's stated concern for consumer choice reflects any actual concern for consumers. The same companies that spent decades flooding Black neighborhoods with menthol advertising, then spent years flooding federal regulators with fake opposition letters, are the same companies now invoking the language of adult freedom and personal responsibility. The machinery behind that language is now, thanks to peer-reviewed research, visible in full detail. What happens next depends on whether policymakers, advocates, and the public choose to act on what they can now clearly see.
