[Vision2020] In All Flavors, Cigars Draw In Young Smokers

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 17, 2013
In All Flavors, Cigars Draw In Young Smokers By SABRINA
TAVERNISE<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/sabrina_tavernise/index.html>

BALTIMORE — At Everest Greenish Grocery, a brightly lit store on a faded
corner of this city, nothing is more popular than a chocolate-flavored
little cigar. They are displayed just above the Hershey bars along with
their colorful cigarillo cousins — white grape, strawberry, pineapple and
Da Bomb Blueberry. And they were completely sold out by 9 one recent
evening, snapped up by young people dropping by for a snack or stopping in
during a night of bar hopping.

“Sorry, no more chocolate,” the night clerk, Qudrad Bari, apologetically
told a young woman holding a fruit drink.

In 2009, Congress passed a landmark
law<http://www.fda.gov/tobaccoproducts/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/ucm246129.htm>intended
to eliminate an important gateway to smoking for young people by
banning virtually all the flavors in cigarettes that advocates said tempted
them. Health experts predicted that the change would lead to deep
reductions in youth smoking. But the law was silent on flavors in cigars
and a number of other tobacco products, instead giving the Food and Drug
Administration broad discretion to decide whether to regulate them.

Four years later, the agency has yet to assert that authority. And a
rainbow of cheap flavored cigars and cigarillos, including some that look
like cigarettes, line the shelves of convenience stores and gas stations,
often right next to the candy. F.D.A. officials say they intend to regulate
cigars and other tobacco products, but they do not say how or when. Smoking
opponents contend that the agency’s delay is threatening recent progress in
reducing smoking among young people.

Cigarette sales are down by a third over the past decade, according to
federal data <http://ttb.gov/tobacco/tobacco-stats.shtml>, but critics of
the agency say the gains are being offset by the rise of cheaper
alternatives like cigars, whose sales have
doubled<http://ttb.gov/tobacco/tobacco-stats.shtml>over the same
period and whose flavored varieties are smoked overwhelmingly
by young people. Loose tobacco and cigars expanded to 10 percent of all
tobacco sold in the United States in 2011, up from just 3 percent in
2000, federal
data show <http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6130a1.htm>.

“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 <http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cgtc/> 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.”

The F.D.A. is now wrestling with how to exercise its authority over an
array of other tobacco products. In recent weeks, for example, it sent
warning letters to several companies that it says are disguising
roll-your-own tobacco as pipe tobacco, a practice that industry analysts
say has become a common way to avoid federal taxes and F.D.A.
regulation<http://www.gao.gov/assets/600/590192.pdf>.


“The giant has finally awoken and hopefully will do its job,” said Ron
Bernstein, the chief executive of Liggett Vector Brands, a cigarette
producer that is worried about unfair competition from cigar makers and
others.

Mitchell Zeller, 55, a public interest lawyer who became the director of
the F.D.A.’s Center for Tobacco Products this spring, acknowledged in an
interview that the emergence of new tobacco products meant a new look was
needed.

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

But new rules have to be grounded in scientific evidence, he said, and
written to withstand legal challenges. The tobacco industry won a recent
court fight against graphic images on cigarette labels.

As for the criticism that the agency has been slow to act, Mr. Zeller said,
“Message received.”

But the F.D.A.’s careful approach exasperates smoking opponents.

“We shouldn’t need 40 years of study to figure out that chocolate- and
grape-flavored cigars are being smoked by young people,” said Matthew L.
Myers, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Traditional
handmade cigars were seen as a luxury for older men, but much of the recent
growth has been in products sold in convenience stores to low-income
customers. Flavored cigars now represent more than half of all convenience
store and gas station cigar sales, up nearly 40 percent since 2008,
according to Nielsen market data analyzed by Cristine
Delnevo<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%28Delnevo%20C*%5BAuthor%5D%29%20AND%20Cigar%5BTitle%2FAbstract%5D>,
a tobacco researcher at Rutgers University.

A three-pack of Good Times flavored cigarillos at Everest costs 99 cents,
an alluring price for the store’s clientele: young, poor African-Americans.

On a recent evening, Mr. Bari, a native of Pakistan, was in a generous
mood. He had just broken his Ramadan fast with sweet tea and was helping a
customer with the last 30 cents needed for a pack of Newports. But he said
flavored cigars were actually more popular in his store than cigarettes.
Sometimes people pay for them with spare change.

Jay Jackson, a 19-year-old nursing assistant in hospital scrubs, rarely has
the $6.50 for a pack of cigarettes, which she also smokes, but can usually
come up with a dollar for the kind of cigar she likes. Flavors improve the
taste of cigars that are otherwise so harsh they make her light headed, she
said, paying Mr. Bari for two — chocolate and cherry.

Mr. Bari said he remembered only strawberry, vanilla and chocolate when he
first arrived 10 years ago. “Now look at this,” he said, motioning toward
the cigar shelf disapprovingly. Some companies are producing small filtered
cigars that look like cigarettes in brown wrappers, avoiding the federal
taxes and F.D.A. regulation required for cigarettes. Mr. Bernstein, the
cigarette producer, contended that such cigars made up much of the recent
increase in cigar sales. A typical pack of 20 costs about $2, compared with
about $6 for a pack of cigarettes.

Tobacco in cigars is cured by a different method than tobacco in
cigarettes. And cigars come in a wrapper made of tobacco, while cigarettes
are wrapped in paper. Smaller cigars popular among young people tend to be
inhaled more, making the health risks similar to cigarettes.

Nationally, about one in six 18- to 24-year-olds smoke cigars, federal
research shows<http://ntr.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/2/608.full.pdf+html>,
compared with only 2 percent of people over 65. More than half of the
younger users smoke flavored cigars, with the highest rates among the
poorest and least educated.

Those are familiar circumstances in certain parts of Baltimore, where life
expectancy for men can be as low as 63 years, a level last seen for all
American men in the 1940s. The smoking rate here is double the national one
— a pattern that Devin Miles, a high school junior who started smoking
cigarettes when he was 10, said was obvious at his school.

“Everybody smokes, even the teachers,” he said.

Cigar producers say they are bracing for F.D.A. action, even as sales have
flattened in the last few years, dampened by new taxes. But they question a
flavor ban, pointing out that the F.D.A. has yet to prohibit the most
common flavor, menthol, in cigarettes and that chewing tobacco still comes
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.”

There is also evidence that cigar purchases are related to marijuana use.
In a survey of 5,000 middle and high school students in Massachusetts in
2003, researchers
found<http://soldzresearch.com/papers/BluntPaper_Addiction_492.pdf>that
about a fifth were using cigar wrappers to smoke marijuana.

Mr. Bari, the night clerk, said many of his customers used the wrappers for
marijuana. “It’s the younger generation,” he said. “Your sister’s crying,
your daughter’s crying, you don’t care.”

One customer, Torri Stevens, a 19-year-old who said she worked at a strip
club in Washington, said she sometimes smoked as many as 12 blunts a day, a
name for marijuana in a cigar wrapper that is associated with Phillies
Blunt, a cigar brand.

Black youths were the one group that registered a rise in cigar smoking
nationally. Twelve percent of black high school students smoked cigars in
2011, compared with 7 percent in 2009, the C.D.C.
said<http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6131a1.htm>.


Maryland, where the legal age to buy cigarettes is 18, did its own survey
and found that cigar smoking had
increased<http://dhmh.maryland.gov/thecigartrap/PDF/Fact_Sheet_Cigar_Use_among_Maryland_Youth.pdf>across
the entire high school population. It is now one of at least six
states where cigar smoking among youths now equals or surpasses cigarette
smoking, according to the C.D.C. <http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss/ss6104.pdf>

Alarmed officials started a public education campaign. A Web site,
TheCigarTrap.com <http://dhmh.maryland.gov/thecigartrap/SitePages/Home.aspx>,
shows an ice cream truck adorned with a giant lit cigar and children
running after it.

On a recent night at Everest Greenish Grocery, Mr. Bari sold cigars to
patrons of a nearby transvestite bar and people who were just leaving work.

Trayvon Henderson, 19, was still wearing his McDonald’s uniform when he
stopped in for a chocolate cigarillo. Cigars are stylish, he said, and some
of his favorite rappers smoke them.

“If they take away the flavor, it would be a problem,” he said, cigarillo
in hand. “I’d probably stop smoking them. Or maybe I’d go back to
cigarettes.”

Jessica Kourkounis contributed reporting.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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