Most Americans want to ban cigarettes and other tobacco products, per new CDC survey

Survey also finds strong support for a ban on menthol cigarettes, which the Biden administration is pursuing.

More than half of American adults support a blanket ban on sales of tobacco products — from cigarettes to vapes and chewing tobacco, according to a new federal survey.

The results, released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also show even stronger support for a ban on sales of menthol cigarettes. The data from the poll conducted in 2021 is the latest evidence of smoking’s declining social acceptability, and offers new support for the Biden administration’s proposals to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars and to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes.

The new analysis of polling data, led by Maeh Al-Shawaf of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health and published today in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease, used a web-based survey of almost 6,500 adults. The survey asked, “To what extent would you support a policy to prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes” and “of all tobacco products?” A total of 62.3 percent of the respondents said they either strongly or somewhat supported a ban on menthol cigarette sales, and 57.3 percent supported a ban on all tobacco sales.

This suggests increasing momentum across the country for such bans, in particular of menthol cigarettes. Last May, YouGov polling found that 44 percent of Americans were supportive of a menthol cigarette ban.

“These data indicate that we are reaching a point where it would be politically feasible to ban the sale of cigarettes,” said Michael Siegel, a professor of public health at Tufts University. “The key to such a policy would be making sure that e-cigarettes are available as an alternative.”

The issue there, Siegel said, is that e-cigarettes are also on the chopping block. Last year, the FDA banned certain vaping products, and the agency has come under bipartisan fire for a delayed and seemingly haphazard approach to the issue.

“The FDA is doing the opposite of what it should be doing,” Siegel told Grid. “It is making it as difficult as possible for e-cigarettes to remain on the market — they have to file expensive and cumbersome applications — while making it as easy as possible for cigarettes to stay on the market — they have to do nothing.”

Generational divides

Americans are not a monolith when it comes to opinions on potential tobacco bans. In the new polling from the CDC, men favored the bans more than women did, as did those with more education. Interestingly, there was a gap in terms of age for the all-tobacco ban, with those aged 18 to 29 more strongly in support of a ban than those aged 60 and over, but that gap did not materialize for the menthol ban.

This contrasts with some related polling research conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2019, which found that opinion splits fairly sharply along age lines when it comes specifically to e-cigarettes. “There’s a really big generational age gap here when it comes to support for banning flavored e-cigarettes or all e-cigarettes,” Lunna Lopes, a senior survey analyst with KFF who led the earlier polling, told Grid.

The relatively aggressive stance from the FDA regarding e-cigarettes is primarily thanks to their popularity among young people, a group that is much more supportive of a ban than older Americans, according to the KFF polling. Potential restrictions on menthol cigarettes are instead more about the well-documented issue of marketing toward certain minority groups, including Black and LGBTQ+ people.

Restricting menthols

As far back as 2011, the FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee found “convincing evidence” that the availability of menthol cigarettes increased the number of smokers, in particular among Black Americans. Advocacy and health groups have pushed for their ban in an effort to reduce a major health disparity.

As of early 2022, at least 145 communities across the U.S. prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes, according to the CDC authors. The new polling results, they wrote, “can inform federal, state, and local efforts to prohibit all tobacco product sales, including menthol cigarettes, reduce tobacco use and tobacco-related disparities, and advance health equity.”

Siegel told Grid that the FDA’s moves to more thoroughly restrict e-cigarettes — which, with some caveats, have been shown to help some people quit smoking — are taking a backward approach based on available data.

“The beauty of e-cigarettes is precisely that their availability makes it feasible to ban cigarettes outright,” he said. “In short, the FDA and tobacco control groups are squandering an opportunity to literally make smoking history and to achieve perhaps the greatest accomplishment in public health in our lifetimes.”

Thanks to Dave Tepps for copy editing this article.

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Most Americans want to ban cigarettes and other tobacco products, per new CDC survey