Few issues unite Al Sharpton, George Floyd’s brother, Grover Norquist, and Americans for Tax Reform, but Joe Biden managed to find it and galvanize yet another broad-based coalition against him. To the ardent protests of civil rights activists, police brutality protesters, deficit hawks, and free marketeers, the president announced that the Food and Drug Administration is banning menthol cigarettes.
As a senator, Biden was a proud foot soldier on the disgraceful and ineffective war on drugs, and as vice president, his boss broke precedent in giving the FDA regulatory control over the tobacco market by signing the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into effect.
But with inflation creeping toward the double digits amid an unprecedented economic contraction, Biden’s decision to crack down on menthol cigarettes — while offering a regressive bailout to disproportionately white voters in the form of student loan debt cancellation, no less — is a political mystery as much as it is a moral travesty.
The obvious case against Biden’s menthol ban is its inevitably disparate racial impact. Whereas menthol smokers compose a little more than a third of the overall cigarette market, 85% of black smokers use menthols. Considering that more than two-thirds of the nation’s states make the mere possession of untaxed cigarettes illegal, the implications for law enforcement, who received zero guidance in the FDA announcement, are profound. Good thing police don’t have a history of killing unarmed black men selling black market cigarettes, or anything!
Then there’s the political question of what the hell Biden thinks he is doing. Polling has made the mandate of voters crystal clear: the No. 1 issue, the only issue that will really determine the swing of the Senate come November, is inflation, which is a pure consequence of reckless monetary expansion. Yet Biden is bending over backward to appease the white, wealthy, middle managerial class with a politically toxic student loan debt cancellation while alienating black voters, the base that made him president, with a ban absolutely nobody but “public health” Karens asked for.
And about those Karens: Trust in public health apparatchiks in general has taken a colossal beating over the course of the pandemic, and the FDA hasn’t been spared. Although the revolving door between the FDA and Big Pharma has always sown distrust among the public, the FDA’s public sparring with the CDC over coronavirus vaccine boosters and, perhaps most crucially, its disastrous decision to pause the administration of single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines based on the flimsiest of data devastated public trust. While more than two-thirds of the public still trust doctors, nurses, and healthcare officials they know personally, just 37% of respondents polled last year by Harvard reported having a great deal or quite a lot of trust in the FDA.
Biden’s ban likely won’t even prove a Faustian bargain, if new polling from Echelon provides any insight. The majority of voters polled from the crucial swing states of Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina all oppose the menthol ban, with twice as many voters saying they’d be more likely to oppose a candidate backing the ban than more likely to support one.
The menthol ban achieves nothing. Regular cigarettes, which are no more safe than menthols, will remain on the market, while black market menthols go untaxed and likely criminalized. The ban does nothing to slow inflation and disproportionately targets the black voters to whom Biden politically owes the most. It’s unpopular with purple states and further empowers a federal agency the public already views as untrustworthy and undemocratic. Biden is making his entire party take a political beating for nothing.
