About No Menthol Sunday 2022
No Menthol Sunday is The Center for Black Health & Equity’s annual faith-based observance day. It is an opportunity to engage faith communities in tough conversations about how menthol and tobacco addiction have robbed us of community health for generations. The tobacco industry has stripped our community’s finances, engaged in targeted unethical marketing, and attempted to dupe young people with flavors like spearmint and menthol. Their industry execs have once said that they don’t smoke their own deadly products — they reserve that right for “the young, the poor, the Black and stupid.”
Those are fighting words.
Now, after a decades-long battle for health justice in tobacco control, we are embarking upon a major win. In 2022, we anticipate that the Food & Drug Administration will finally issue standard regulations that will prohibit the sale of tobacco products with any characterizing flavors like menthol. This is historic! Just as it was written in Isaiah 55:11, we are now seeing the fulfillment of what we had long set out to accomplish!
Devont'e Kurt Watson 