What's new in Nicotine & Tobacco Research?

Cigarettes have about 600 ingredients, but menthol is the only one the tobacco industry advertises and about which consumers make conscious buying choices. A fourth of all cigarettes sold in the United States are mentholated, but as this N&TR supplement—and the presentations at the First Conference on Menthol Cigarettes, convened in 2002, that it reports on—make abundantly clear, there are far more questions than answers about menthol’s effects. The tobacco industry began looking into menthol’s toxic effects in the 1940s, but health researchers have come to the table only in recent years. Clark and colleagues (p. S5) review some of the urgent questions on the research agenda: