WHAT’S NEW
Tobacco products shouldn’t be sweet, cheap and easy to get
Menthol, along with other sweet, fruity and candy flavors in tobacco products make tobacco products taste better and feel less harsh on the throat, making them more appealing and easier for young people to use. Flavors also create the impression that these products are less harmful than they really are. More than 80% of youth who use tobacco products started with a flavored product and continue to use flavored products. New York State prohibited the sale of flavored e-cigarettes containing nicotine in 2020. But other flavored tobacco products remain ubiquitous. Menthol flavored cigarettes. Chew and spit tobacco in cherry, apple and peach. Little cigars and cigarillos in blueberry, grape and chocolate. CDTFC’s most recent visits to local licensed tobacco retailers found that the only flavored tobacco products available in...
Community Spotlight: Tammy Miller
CDTFC is proud to announce the launch of our new video series, Community Spotlight, in which we’ll share stories from Capital District residents about the role tobacco has played in their lives or neighborhoods. Our first spotlight is on Tammy Miller who lives in Albany. Tammy and her family directly suffered from the tobacco industry’s aggressive and successful marketing of menthol cigarettes to the Black community. She began smoking at a young age and was also exposed to secondhand smoke from her parents, who were both smokers. Tobacco use exacted an enormous toll on their health. Tammy’s story is all too common and an important one to tell. In New York State, 86% of Black smokers use menthol as compared to 36% of white smokers. Menthol makes it harder to quit which helps explain why, even though African Americans...
Tobacco Use Takes Disproportionate Toll on LGBTQIA+* Lives
NYS has launched a new phase of the It's Not Just media campaign which exposes the tobacco industry's intentional efforts to increase menthol product appeal to the LGBTQIA+ community. LGBTQIA+ people use tobacco, including menthol cigarettes, at higher rates than people who are cisgender and straight. National data shows that people who identify as bisexual are twice as likely to start smoking or be current smokers; 35.5% of transgender people are current smokers compared to 14.9% of heterosexual adults; and black transgender youth use tobacco at six times the rate of black cis youth. Additionally, 51% of lesbian/gay and 46% of bisexual smokers use menthol cigarettes, compared to 39% of heterosexual smokers. While the prevalence of stressors such as stigma, prejudice and discrimination no doubt contribute to the disproportionately high...
To the left is a typical tobacco product display. If you don’t use tobacco, you may not even notice, but kids do. Kids see. Kids notice. Kids remember. In fact, kids are more than twice as likely as adults to notice and remember retail tobacco marketing.