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A comment on FDA Moves to Ban All Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars. Parent comment

Re:FDA Moves to Ban All Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars by oh_sigh on Thursday April 29, 2021 @05:34PM (#26987083)
There are only 42 million black people in the US. Are you really saying that 40% of black Americans smoke menthols specifically? And presumably some percentage smoke something without menthol? That doesn't seem right.
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Re:FDA Moves to Ban All Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars by LeifCarrotson on Thursday April 29, 2021 @06:06PM (#26987419)
You do have to be careful with your groupings. I wonder if this isn't a confusion between the number of cigarettes smoked by a particular population and the number of people from each population who smoke, or something like that.

I'm not sure where the number '20 million menthol users' keeps coming from, perhaps somewhere in the data behind [1]? Regardless, [2] and [3] suggest that somewhere around 20% of the African American population smokes tobacco in some form. Among those 20% of black Americans who smoke about 85% use menthols.

[1] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/cbhsq-report...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/african-americans/in...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/african-americans/in...

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