97% of the record menthol-ban comments were form letters, Rutgers audit of all 246,808 finds

A Rutgers Health team read every one of the 246,808 comments filed on the FDA's 2022 proposals to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, and found that 97% of the menthol comments and 93% of the cigar comments were form letters ^[1][2]. The volume of that response was a stated reason for delay, so the composition of it is a policy fact, not a curiosity ^[3][6].

According to the account published by phys.org, nearly 250,000 comments arrived and the record response led the Biden administration to delay a final decision ^[3]. The study, in JAMA Network Open, reports that roughly 46% of the menthol form letters contained content traceable to tobacco companies, naming Reynolds American's "Own It, Voice It" campaign and Altria's "Voices for Consumer Choice" campaign ^[4]. Two percent of all comments were unique ^[5]. Combining the two figures, campaign-traceable text accounts for something on the order of 45% of all menthol comments filed ^[14].

The method is unglamorous and reproducible. The researchers downloaded the public comments, used statistical software to find recurring phrases, and matched submissions to 17 distinct form-letter templates ^[7]. Stripping form letters and near duplicates left 3,342 unique menthol comments and 1,432 unique cigar comments ^[8] - together about 1.9% of the docket ^[15]. That is the number a rulemaker would want if the question is how many people wrote something of their own.

The de-duplicated remainder does not flip the direction of opinion: 96% of unique menthol comments opposed the ban and 99% opposed the cigar rule ^[9]. What changes is the content. The leading arguments were economic, covering lost revenue and sales, an illicit market, and education as a substitute for prohibition, while only 3% to 5% of unique comments engaged the health evidence behind the rules ^[10]. Lead author Andrea Villanti of the Rutgers School of Public Health said the sheer volume was used as a reason to delay a policy that would have saved lives, and that how few submissions were unique, and how much industry shaped both volume and content, was not considered ^[6].

The pipeline was documented separately. An earlier study in the same Rutgers project, led by Ollie Ganz, analyzed direct-to-consumer emails sent to customers during the comment period that urged recipients to "take action" and routed them to company-run sites, which assembled personalized anti-ban letters from menus of prewritten arguments and filed them with the FDA ^[11]. That design defeats naive duplicate detection: the strings differ, the argument set does not.

For scale on what the delay covers: menthol cigarettes are more than a third of the U.S. cigarette market and a majority of cigarettes smoked by Black Americans, and researchers have estimated 378,000 U.S. premature deaths attributable to them between 1980 and 2018 ^[12]. A third study in the project, led by Olivia Wackowski, found that 75% of 122 news articles cited the rule's potential to reduce disease and save lives, with opposition coverage centered on policing in Black communities ^[13].

Watch whether dockets start publishing unique-comment counts alongside totals, and whether the 17-template matching approach is applied to other high-volume rulemakings. Until then, a comment count is a measure of campaign capacity.