Regulating chemicals one-by-one has allowed the tobacco industry to skirt menthol bans by creating new additives with similar effects but unclear safety profiles

In 2020, lawmakers in California and Massachusetts banned menthol, a chemical that causes a cooling sensation, as an additive in cigarettes.

Soon after, we learned in detail how the tobacco industry circumvented these laws by substituting menthol with other cooling chemicals in their new “nonmenthol” cigarettes and other tobacco products.

This is the oldest trick in the book when dealing with chemicals deemed hazardous or otherwise problematic: stop using the original molecule and either find or make a substitute with the same function but for which safety data are scant or nonexistent. This allows the company to continue to produce chemicals of concern while the agencies like the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency grind away to catch up to these new alternatives.

That the tobacco industry can readily do this speaks to a fatal flaw in how we regulate chemicals in this country.

This whack-a-mole plays out in all kinds of products—not just cigarettes: We ban an individual chemical that gets replaced with another that is not on a restricted substances list. We saw this same story play out for bisphenol A, a plastics precursor and endocrine disruptor that interferes with the normal production and work of the body’s hormones.