It was not until I was seventeen years old that I first found out that such a thing as flavored cigarettes existed.
This is from the American Lung Association:
“Among high school students in 2007, the most prevalent forms of tobacco used in the last thirty days were cigarettes (20 percent), cigars (13.6 percent), and smokeless tobacco (includes chewing tobacco and snuff; 7.9 percent).8 Bidi use (skinny candy-flavored cigarettes) in the last year by 12th graders was 1.7 percent in 2007, while kretek use (clove cigarettes) in the last year by 12th graders was 6.8 percent.9 Although smokeless tobacco use previously was uncommon among adolescents, older teens began using it between 1970 and 1985, at the same time that the smokeless tobacco industry was strengthening their marketing efforts.”
Flavored cigarettes are clearly not the reason that most kids start smoking. From what I can see, the majority start because they are trying to create a certain image of themselves, which is generally based on the smoking of cigarettes specifically—not cigars, not kreteks, not pipes.
As much as I’d like it if no one smoked, especially children, I don’t believe a ban on flavored cigarettes is necessary. Everyone knows that smoking is harmful to one’s health. But people still smoke, and that is a choice that should be up to the individual. Banning something that a relatively small number of people enjoy, while leaving existing laws for regular cigarettes and cigars intact is ridiculous. I doubt it will have any effect at all besides irritating a very small group of people needlessly.
Anyway, Celestial Seasonings makes an herbal chi tea called “Bengal Spice,” which, combined with some rolling tobacco, (or, if you are not a tobacco smoker, as I am not, some other ‘filler,’ just to give the smoke some weight) can be rolled into a cigarette that tastes remarkably like a clove. (By the way, anyone looking to make their own kreteks should avoid thinking that cloves give are what produce the distinctive flavor. Cloves themselves taste terrible; it’s the bath of spices that the dry materials are given that produces that wonderful flavor.)