This distinguished it from the more mass-market, locally produced cigarettes, maintaining its premium niche status
Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (2021) excerpt Werner, Carl Avery
During his tenure as a senior security director for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Luna contributed to a 2015 report on how illicit tobacco fuels transnational crime, corruption, and terrorism and creates greater insecurity and instability in many of todays security hot spots around the world. He said illicit tobacco was funding bad actors, with open source reports showing 15 of the worlds leading terrorist groups regularly rely on illicit cigarettes for funding, including al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas
This approach takes a retrospective view, presenting market share as a percentage of the total market, as if these products had always been sold under an FDA marketing order, including the 11 products approved after March 2024