United States: The tobacco industry has overwhelmed the consultation on menthol

A study published on August 20, 2026 in JAMA Network Open[1] It is established that the public consultations launched in 2022 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the ban on menthol in cigarettes and characteristic flavorings in cigars were largely the subject of form letters designed or circulated by the tobacco industry. In April 2024, U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra cited precisely the "historic attention" these proposals had garnered and the "immense amount of feedback" received to justify postponing the measure. Both draft regulations were ultimately withdrawn in January 2025.

The authors, affiliated with Rutgers University, among others, downloaded all the submissions filed in the two FDA regulatory consultation documents in October 2023. They then automatically sorted them to distinguish texts actually written by their signatories from mass-circulated template letters. The procedure combines three steps. Exact duplicates were first removed. A manual review of 3,000 randomly selected submissions then identified 17 template letter models and their characteristic wording. Finally, a text comparison tool eliminated submissions whose similarity to another exceeded a threshold of 50, thus neutralizing slightly reworded variants. The remaining texts, considered unique, underwent thematic analysis using a coding grid validated by two independent coders, with a high level of agreement between them. The analyses were conducted from October 2023 to December 2024.

A participation that was overwhelmingly pre-formatted

The menthol dossier received 175,285 contributions and the flavored cigar dossier 71,523, for a total of 246,808. After removing form letters and duplicates, only 3,342 contributions on menthol and 1,432 on cigars were found to be unique, representing 2,130 of the total in each of the two dossiers.

The identity of the contributors remains largely undetermined. For 99 of the contributions to the menthol dossier and 98 of those to the cigar dossier, the category of the declarant, the state, or the country of origin is missing. Among the only unique contributions, the most represented category is that of individual consumers, with 44 texts on menthol and 49 on cigars, followed by private industry, with 10 and 15 respectively.

Standard letters directly attributable to cigarette manufacturers

In the menthol case, nearly half of the sample letters contain content directly linked to an identified tobacco company, representing 77,445 contributions. Two platforms account for the vast majority of these. The Own It Voice It platform, operated by RAI Services (Reynolds American), alone generated 54,835 contributions, nearly a third of all the sample letters in the case. The templates distributed by Altria, under the Marlboro and Voices for Consumer Choice banners, total approximately 22,600.

The cigar case file presents the same mechanism on a smaller scale. Industry-sourced content represents 12,% of the standard letters, primarily distributed by Swedish Match and Altria. Conversely, letters sent directly by employees in the sector are proportionally more numerous and originate notably from Swisher, Drew Estate, and Intercontinental Cigar Corporation.

The mechanical nature of these submissions is clearly evident in the most widely used template, identified by the authors as letter 2A. Submitted 51,146 times in the cigars folder, where it alone accounts for 77 of the standard letters, and 29,135 times in the menthol folder, it is written from the perspective of a local shopkeeper and refers only to menthol cigarettes, including in the contributions sent to the folder dedicated to flavored cigars. The authors also note a discontinuous submission pattern, characterized by days with no contributions followed by peaks of tens of thousands of standard letters.

The imbalance between contributions hostile to regulation and those in support is also striking at the level of the templates themselves. No template letters in favor of regulating flavored cigars were found, and only one template supporting the ban on menthol was identified, out of 3,210 contributions.

The economic arguments promoted by the industry overshadow the public health justifications

Among the individual submissions, 96 opposed the ban on menthol and 99 opposed the ban on flavored cigars. The dominant themes were economic and security-related. Loss of revenue and sales was cited in 35 of the individual submissions on menthol and 49 of those on cigars. The risk of the development of an illicit market appeared in 25 and 38 of the texts respectively, the existence of more effective means of action in 18 and 28, and the supposed ineffectiveness of bans in 13 and 20.

Conversely, only 4 of the unique contributions on menthol and 1 of those on cigars explicitly support the proposed measures. The authors note that only 3 to 5 of the unique contributions address the health effects of tobacco, while 75 of the articles in the American national press devoted to these same draft regulations highlighted their expected health benefits. They conclude that the sheer volume of comments was used to justify postponing a decision without taking into account the massive and biased industrial origin of the contributions.

«"The sheer volume of comments was used as a pretext to delay a public health policy that would have saved lives.", summarizes Andrea Villanti, professor at Rutgers School of Public Health and lead author of the study. «"What hasn't been taken into account is the scarcity of truly unique contributions, nor the extent of the influence exerted by the tobacco industry on both the volume and content of these comments."»[2]

The postponement and subsequent withdrawal of these two projects have significant health consequences. Menthol cigarettes represent more than a third of the American market and the majority of cigarettes consumed by African Americans. Studies cited by the authors estimate that 378,000 premature deaths in the United States between 1980 and 2018 were attributable to menthol cigarettes.

Manipulation of consultations has also been demonstrated in the European Union.

This approach is not unique to the American context. During the public consultation launched by the European Commission on the revision of anti-smoking legislation, Philip Morris International deployed the "Your voice, your choice" campaign in the Netherlands.«[3], The campaign, which made available in tobacconists an artificial intelligence generator that produced pre-written contributions opposing the strengthening of European regulations, was then submitted as spontaneous citizen responses. Analysis indicates that 71% of the Dutch contributions and nine out of ten responses written in Dutch were attributable to this tool, and that of the 370 contributions examined, only six supported stricter regulations. The Dutch Advertising Code Commission ruled this campaign illegal on August 7, 2026, finding that its consultative guise did not neutralize its commercial nature. Public health organizations are calling on the European Commission to take this manipulation of the consultation into account when analyzing the responses.

Four years apart, the same mechanism is at play, now with an added dimension of automation. These sequences stem from a long-standing and documented practice: mobilizing seemingly independent third parties to steer and saturate consultation processes. The aim is to create the appearance of citizen opposition and delay the adoption of measures whose effectiveness has been established. Previous studies had already highlighted comparable strategies during the British consultations on plain packaging and the New Zealand consultations on vaping products. The authors therefore recommend that consultation platforms record the referring website for each submission and require identifying data to link contributions to the campaign authors who initiated them.

©Generation Without Tobacco

AE

[1] Villanti AC, Tomaino M, Johnson A, et al. Public Comments and Federal Rulemaking for Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars. JAMA Netw Open. 2026;9(8):e2629962. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.29962

[2] Tobacco companies flooded federal comment periods, and menthol and flavored cigar bans stalled, Phys.org, published on August 20, 2026, accessed on August 25, 2026

[3] Netherlands: Philip Morris's AI advertising campaign deemed illegal, Tobacco-Free Generation, published on August 18, 2026, accessed on August 25, 2026