Beverly Hills’ city council voted unanimously last week to make their town a tobacco-free zone. The sale of cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco, and e-cigarettes will be forbidden except at a handful of high-class cigar lounges and hotels.
Although Beverly Hills becomes the first city to adopt such a draconian policy on tobacco and nicotine products, tobacco use has been on the way out for quite some time. High taxes and tobacco prices, along with smoking bans at bars and a more widespread acknowledgment of the substance’s health risks, have all contributed to a dramatic decline in Americans’ smoking. The relative lack of butts on the ground tells the tale.
Smoking is down by more than half since 1964. It fell by nearly 25% just between 2005 and 2016, to 15.5% of the total adult population. What’s more, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the largest increase in quitters during that recent period came among smokers aged 25 to 44. This means that smoking rates will likely fall even faster in the next 20 years. And those dinosaurs who still do smoke are smoking fewer cigarettes per day on average: 14, down from 17 in 2005.
But Beverly Hills is going further, and the rest of California is likely to follow. At the same time, the state has legalized marijuana. Oakland has just decriminalized hallucinogenic mushrooms, and it’s only a matter of time before a statewide ballot initiative for psilocybin makes the statewide ballot.
In other words, if you still do smoke, California would like you to consider taking up drugs instead.
