Biden Administration Delays Planned Menthol Cigarette Ban

The proposed ban on the sales of menthol cigarettes, which was expected to be announced last year, has been indefinitely delayed.

Today, the Biden administration announced that it was delaying the rule. As has been previously reported, this decision is likely due to concerns about how a ban would impact November’s election, specifically, how it would affect the turnout of Black voters.

This news is important to some cigar smokers because the menthol cigarette ban has been proposed alongside a separate rule that would ban the sale of flavored cigars. Today’s announcement has made no mention of the ban on flavored cigars, though it seems highly unlikely that the White House would move forward with the flavored cigar rule but not the menthol cigarette rule.

Throughout 2023, officials at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) made public promises to introduce the rules in 2023. On Dec. 6, the White House Office of Management and Budget Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs unveiled its Fall 2023 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, a semi-annual update of various planned rules and regulations. That update confirmed what had been speculated: despite many public promises to enact the bans in 2023, they were being delayed until—at least—2024.

That calendar updated the rules to “03/00/24” though that date was not binding. March came and went without any announcement, which seemed to further the idea that the rules were delayed due to the election.

“This rule has garnered historic attention and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the civil rights and criminal justice movement. It’s clear that there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time,” said Xavier Becerra, secretary of Health Human & Services, which oversees FDA.

Notably, that was the entirety of Becerra’s statement.

As to what happens next, it’s important to understand that today’s decision was made by the White House and not by FDA. For its part, FDA completed the work on the regulations and the agency presumably wants to move forward with the regulations.

There’s no reason why the Biden administration—or a Trump administration—could, at a later date, take the work that the FDA has completed and accelerate it to the finish line.

Beyond that, there’s a chance that a court might force the White House to act. Earlier this month, three public health groups sued FDA over its various delays in enacting these regulations. Notably, it was a 2020 lawsuit filed by some of the same groups that likely led to the Biden administration announcing plans for the menthol ban in the first place. In April 2013, around a dozen groups created a formal citizen petition to enact a menthol cigarette ban. After feeling like the agency had not met the legal requirements for responding to this formal petition, the groups sued the FDA in 2020. As part of that lawsuit, the government pledged to respond to the citizen petition by April 29, 2021. FDA did, to the day, which kicked off the proposed bans on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars.

Charlie Minato

I am an editor and co-founder of halfwheel.com/Rueda Media, LLC. I previously co-founded and published TheCigarFeed, one of the two predecessors of halfwheel. I have written about the cigar industry for more than a decade, covering everything from product launches to regulation to M&A. In addition, I handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff here at halfwheel. I enjoy playing tennis, watching boxing, falling asleep to the Le Mans 24, wearing sweatshirts year-round and eating gyros. echte liebe.