Regarding menthols

Radar Online has an interesting look at why menthol cigarettes are popular with African-American smokers. An excerpt:

By the 1960s, magazines like Ebony and Jet were packed with cigarette advertisements that featured African-American models and referenced black culture, like Lorillard’s “Newport is a whole new bag of menthol smoking” (after James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”) and R.J. Reynold’s “Different Smokes for Different Folks” (a nod to a Sly Stone hit) campaign for Salem Extra. Some of the ads seemed almost progressive, encouraging the era’s burgeoning black middle class to “Come Up to the Kool Taste,” and promising them that smoking a Kool was “Like riding a Rolls Royce.”

To make further inroads, the tobacco companies loudly supported the Civil Rights Movement and later made regular and significant contributions to organizations like the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. By the early ’80s, when a young Kool G Rap (neé Nathaniel Wilson) was growing up in Queens, mentholated cigarettes had become so ingrained in the black community they were widely considered the Official Cigarettes of Black Folks….

The rest is here.