Young Smokers Turn to Flavored Cigars

The FDA still has not issued guidelines with respect to flavored cigars, an omission that has sent smoking rates among young smokers upward.

August 20, 2013

BALTIMORE — With a 2009 federal law prohibiting flavors in cigarettes but not cigars, young smokers have increasingly turned to flavored cigars, the Associated Press reports

Rather than ban flavors in cigars in 2009, Congress delegated regulatory authority to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), though the agency has not yet asserted that authority. As a result, inexpensive flavored cigars and cigarillos have flooded the marketplace.

FDA officials have said they intend to regulate cigars, though they have not said how or when. Meanwhile, smoking opponents maintain that the agency’s delay is reversing progress in reducing smoking among young people.

While cigarette sales have dropped one-third over the past decade, cigar sales have doubled over the same period.

“The 20th century was the cigarette century, and we worked very hard to address that,” said Gregory N. Connolly, the director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Now the 21st century is about multiple tobacco products. They’re cheap. They’re flavored. And some of them you can use anywhere.”

Mitchell Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, acknowledged that the emergence of new tobacco products — flavored cigars included — has presented new challenges for the agency.

“What we’ve seen in the past 10 years is this remarkable transformation of the marketplace,” Zeller said. “There are products being sold today — unregulated products — that literally did not exist 10 years ago.”

Nationally, about one in six 18- to 24-year olds smoke cigars, compared with only 2% of people 65 years or older. More than half of the younger smokers smoke flavored cigars.

Cigar producers question a flavor ban, pointing out that the FDA has not yet prohibited menthol — the most common flavor — in cigarettes, and that chewing tobacco is available in flavors.

“We continue to ask the question, ‘What’s the rationale?’” said Joe Augustus, a spokesman for Swisher International, a cigar producer. Flavors have existed “since the beginning of time,” he said, and are popular with “the guys who are cutting your lawn and fixing your car.”

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