04-29-2021, 08:34 AM
(04-29-2021, 08:12 AM)fredtoast Wrote: Kind of OT but I have a question that everyone seems to be ignoring.
Why are black people so much more attracted to menthol cigarettes than white people? I don't think the disparity was created by marketing and advertising. I just think the marketing and advertising to target minorities is because they were already favored menthol brands.
It's actually a topic that has had quite a few research papers done on it. I know in college we looked at some of them that focused around the marketing practices and there definitely was a piling on in the 1950's and 1960's once it was established that menthol cigarettes were the preferred cigarette of the African American community. Even things like Kool brand was part of it as it intertwined itself with the "Cool Jazz" movement and helped reinforce menthol's place in the culture. After that, you can point to things like almost 3x more advertisements for menthol cigarettes being in African American targeted magazines than other magazines that had cigarette advertisements. That kind of behavior carried on for decades, and we know a lot of this from internal documents that came from the tobacco industry lawsuits we have seen over the years.
As to the very start though, I am not sure anyone will ever really know how that train started rolling. There was a paper published a few years ago that did link Menthol preference to a specific gene only found in African Americans but the gene is only found in about 10% of the African American population so it doesn't explain the whole thing but it is an interesting thing to note.
