I don’t buy into the ban having racist roots but I am concerned about the result of the ban increasing race problems. There was a famous case in the past few years of a big black guy being killed during a police interaction and the underlying reason for the interaction was that he was selling loose cigarettes on the street.

Prohibition and the failed drug war have shown us that making something illegal won’t stop demand or supply. So now a bunch of black people who are physically hooked on a specific product are going to have it taken away (I smoked, it was a nightmare fight to quit) and for sure people are going to start selling bootleg product (unless menthol can’t be bootlegged, I know nothing about the creation of this product) and most of them will be black since most of the menthol demand is in black communities.

Unless the police don’t intend to try and stop this we would expect it to increase the amount of police interactions and then naturally increase the number of violent interactions leading to death.