San Francisco residents will no longer be allowed to smoke cigarettes inside apartments, but they’re still welcome to smoke marijuana.
The Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance by a 10-1 vote on Tuesday, making San Francisco the largest city in the country to ban tobacco smoking in apartment buildings, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The ordinance is intended to protect residents from secondhand smoke.
The original proposal also sought to ban residents from smoking cannabis in their apartments, but several supervisors voted against that measure. E-cigarettes, sometimes known as vapor, are included in the ban.
The city’s health department will be responsible for enforcing the new law, which asks the department to educate violators and help smokers quit the habit. Repeat offenders could be fined $1,000 a day but wouldn’t be evicted for any violation.
“I’m very concerned about people’s rights, but I’m also concerned about people’s health,” Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who opposed excluding cannabis from the ordinance, said. “The science and the data (on secondhand smoke) is incontrovertible.”
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who wrote the amendment to exempt cannabis, argued in favor of exempting marijuana because there are no designated public areas where cannabis users could go smoke, such as cigarette smokers have.
“Unlike tobacco smokers who could still leave their apartments to step out to the curb or smoke in other permitted outdoor smoking areas, cannabis users would have no such legal alternatives,” Mandelman said.
One local cannabis dispensary owner Shawn Richards said the ban on smoking, whether it’s cannabis or tobacco, would infringe on people’s “free will and rights,” adding that the new ban would likely disproportionately impact minorities living in multi-unit housing.
“These supervisors need to tackle the real issues, and not issues that dictate people’s movements and whereabouts and how we function in society,” Richards said.
The ordinance still has to pass a second vote of the board next week, but it is largely viewed as a formality. Mayor London Breed is expected to sign it upon approval, and the new law would go into effect 30 days after.
San Francisco will be the 64th California city to introduce such a smoking ban.
