CLEVELAND — An ordinance that would restrict the sale of flavored tobacco and menthol products introduced by Mayor Justin Bibb in Cleveland has been pushed aside by the city council since February.

Those products mask the taste of tobacco, making them easier to get hooked on and harder to quit.

“If we’re talking about racism as a public health crisis, we have to talk about menthol and flavored products,” said Yvonka Hall, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition.

It’s the first organization in the state to focus specifically on disparities for Black residents.

“This is my community,” Hall said. “I’ve lived here almost my entire life.”

She has lost several family members to complications from smoking and lives with bronchitis as a direct result of exposure to secondhand smoke. 

She’s been part of the fight to ban flavored tobacco and menthol products in Cleveland since the beginning. 

“For me, I look at it and say it’s personal,” she said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 11% of Americans smoke. 

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University’s Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods found 35% of Cleveland residents are smokers, the highest rate of any city in the country. 

According to the city’s public health director, smoking is the also leading cause of death in Cleveland.

“And so for us, we have to do everything we can to avert the crisis,” Hall said. “And for the council, that’s through policy.”

The ordinance has yet to go before the committee, which is required before being voted on.

Council President Blaine Griffin said that’s because members need time to vet the legislation.

He said he believes council members may be more open to a county-wide ban and worries what impact a ban in Cleveland would have on local convenience store owners.

“We believe that some of these things need to be looked at, you know, on a broader level,” Griffin said. “As opposed to just putting city of Cleveland businesses, having one set of rules for them, whereas they have another set of rules for the suburbs.”

A 2022 report from the CDC found “tobacco companies have aggressively marketed menthol cigarettes to African American people since at least the 1950s and continue to do so today.”

Researchers at the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies, including Kymberle Sterling, recently published a study showing one of the ways Black youth are now targeted is through the sale of cheap, flavored cigars.

“They are more prevalent,” Sterling said. “They are more pervasive, and cigars are very cheap in these particular communities. We know that these are the same strategies that the tobacco industry has used to hook generations of Black Americans on menthol.”

Hall said she feels a responsibility to the Black youth in her home community to continue pushing despite a slow response from council because she’s seen how easy smoking is to pick up and the devastating consequences of getting addicted. 

“Understanding how they were targeted at a young age, and seeing that same targeting to my grandkids is enough for me to say I have to do everything that I can to save them,” Hall said.

1-800 QUIT NOW is a free hotline that anybody in the state of Ohio can call to get free resources to help quit smoking.