04-29-2021, 10:39 AM
(04-29-2021, 08:34 AM)Au165 Wrote: 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.
One of my officers, I have mentioned her before, and I had this exact same discussion more than once. One conclusion was that menthol additive makes cheaper tobacco taste smoother by masking the harshness. So they can sell cheaper cigarettes to the black community for the same price or higher. There is a YouTube channel I really like called Steve1989MREInfo. Basically he eats MRE's from around the world, even going back to before WW2. There isn't a lot from those older MRE's that he could actually eat, but he still opens them. Cigarettes were included with older rations and he never encountered a pack of menthols until the Vietnam era rations. As an aside, I know it sounds like it wouldn't be interesting at all, but the channel is actually really enjoyable, mainly because Steve is an interesting/amusing guy. As to the question at hand, this may be a chicken/egg argument.
