Sales of cigarettes with WS-3, a synthetic cooling agent, in an area with a menthol cigarette sales prohibition
Jessica K Pepper, In Heon Lee, Alexander Maki, Taylor Lee, Jonathan Hannings, Apoorva O Rajan-Sharma, Kevin C Frissell, Jennifer K Bernat · 2026
Read Sales of cigarettes with WS-3, a synthetic cooling agent, in an area with a menthol cigarette sales prohibition by Jessica K Pepper, In Heon Lee, Alexander Maki, Taylor Lee, Jonathan Hannings, Apoorva O Rajan-Sharma, Kevin C Frissell, Jennifer K Bernat (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13500345.txt.
Description
Pepper and colleagues tracked sales in 2026 of cigarettes containing WS-3, a lab-made cooling agent that chills the throat without a mint taste, after California banned menthol cigarette sales. Tobacco firms market such cigarettes as menthol stand-ins. Using retail scanner data for the Pacific division, which bundles California with Washington and Oregon, the team followed weekly sales from mid-2022 to early 2024.
WS-3 cigarettes appeared in the Pacific data about two weeks before the December 2022 ban took effect and were nearly absent elsewhere until the next spring. Most WS-3 sales, 87 percent, occurred in the Pacific division, peaking near nineteen thousand cartons a week. Menthol sales in the region fell by over a hundred thousand cartons a week within two months of the ban. The authors say the coolant cigarettes replaced only part of the menthol drop, leaving a net fall in flavored sales.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jessica K Pepper, In Heon Lee, Alexander Maki, Taylor Lee, Jonathan Hannings, Apoorva O Rajan-Sharma, Kevin C Frissell, Jennifer K Bernat |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 15 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |