This morning's New York Times carries a front page article about congressional legislation giving the FDA oversight of tobacco. The bill "would try to reduce smoking's allure to young people by banning most flavored cigarettes, including clove and cinnamon." But—and of course there's a but—it exempts menthol, even though, as the article points out, "menthol masks the harsh taste of cigarettes for beginners and may make it harder for the addicted to kick the smoking habit." Why?

"[M]entholated brands are so crucial to the American cigarette industry. They make up more than one-fourth of the $70 billion American cigarette market and are becoming increasingly important to the industry leader, Philip Morris USA, without whose lobbying support the legislation might have no chance of passage."

Let's see:

We've decided that a product is so harmful to the lives of American citizens that we're taking steps to regulate its use and marketing. While your editor, who has been smoking since he was 14 and has the wheezy inability to walk up several flights of stairs without pausing to prove it, feels that smoking should be an individual's choice, he also feels that so long as we're going to make it more difficult for people to start the habit, we might as well try and extend that benefit to everyone. He is also a little outraged (but not at all surprised) that Congress is kowtowing to the industry it is supposedly overseeing, particularly in this case, where the stated reason for the menthol exemption is that an ever-growing number of the consumers the industry is killing with its product are menthol users.

And who are these smokers? Well, a lot of them are black. Draw your own conclusions!

Related: Why do black folks tend to smoke menthols? Radar's Ethnicist examined the question last year.