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The most widely used flavored cigarettes and the most popular cigarettes of choice among African-American smokers are menthol cigarettes. Most of health experts don’t understand why menthol.

The Food and Drug Administration would try to reduce smoking allure to young people by banning most flavored cigarettes, including clove and cinnamon.

This new legislation would exempt menthol - even though menthol masks the harsh taste of cigarettes for beginners and may make it harder for the addicted to kick the smoking habit. Public health authorities suppose that menthol might be a factor in high cancer rates in African-Americans.

The reason menthol is seen as politically off limits, despite those concerns, is that mentholated brands are so crucial to the American cigarette industry. They make up more than one-fourth of the $70 billion American cigarette market and are becoming increasingly important to the industry leader.

Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, who supports the new bill, said: "I would have been in favor of banning menthol. But as a practical matter that simply wasn’t doable."

Supporters of the tobacco legislation, including the Senate bill’s sponsor, Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, say the bill addresses the potential health risks of menthol by giving the F.D.A. the authority to remove cigarette additives, including menthol, if they are proved harmful.

Menthol is particularly controversial because public health authorities have worried about its health effects on African-Americans. Nearly 75% of black smokers use menthol brands, compared with only about one in four white smokers.

National Cancer Institute data shows that African-American men get lung cancer at a rate 50% higher than white men — a gap that most scientists say cannot be fully explained by historically higher rates of smoking by black men.

"I think we can say definitively that menthol induces smoking in the African-American community and subsequently serves as a direct link to African-American death and disease," said the former official, Robert G. Robinson.

Tobacco companies acknowledge the health hazards of smoking but they affirmed that menthol does not worse health risks. One of the government’s current top public health scientists on tobacco pointed that menthol smokers may be exposed to higher levels of dangerous compounds than nonmenthol smokers.

In five large studies of menthol cigarettes only one has found higher rates of cancer among menthol smokers than nonmenthol smokers, and only in men.

Scientists suggest that menthol makes it harder to kick the smoking habit - a view shared even by many scientists who say that menthol in cigarettes is not itself dangerous.