Consumers, small businesses, and public health won a small but important victory in the city of San Leandro, Calif., Monday night.
The city council refused to enact a ban on local retailers selling flavored tobacco products, throwing it back to a rules committee for reconsideration in September.
Proposals for tobacco flavor bans have spread rapidly across the Bay Area and are under active consideration in Oakland and San Francisco. While occasionally well-meaning, these prohibitions are always misconceived.
Aside from the obvious affront to consumer choice and small business, these bans have at their heart measures that would actually harm public health and undermine the very goals their proponents claim to be pursuing.
This is because they would prohibit not just the sale of flavored cigars and pipe tobacco but also of flavored vapor and smokeless tobacco products, which represent a fraction of the risks of combustible tobacco.
The value of these flavored vapor and smokeless tobacco products are that they allow smokers to switch to a nicotine product they find satisfying while massively reducing their risk of death and disease.
Quitting nicotine cold turkey often proves too difficult for many, and as a consequence, they continue smoking until they suffer an early death. As the late professor Michael Russell said, “People smoke for nicotine but they die from the tar.”
Anti-smoking activists may wish for a world in which adults could switch from smoking to abstinence at the drop of a hat, but in the real world the most effective policy to help smokers quit is to give them more options to reduce their risk of smoking-related disease — It is here that flavors play such an important role.
A survey of vapers published in 2013 showed more than 91 percent classified themselves as “former” smokers, with the majority saying flavor variety was a “very important” factor in their journey to smoking cessation. The study also found that the number of flavors used was independently associated with quitting smoking.
Supporters of flavor bans argue they’re necessary due to the rise in teens experimenting with flavored vapor products, which could lead to them transitioning to smoking. But there is no evidence to suggest these products are acting as any sort of gateway to smoking.
The teen smoking rate has been in free fall, dropping to its lowest point in recorded history at 9.3 percent in 2015, at the very same time as experimentation with vaping has risen. Furthermore, the number of teens who vape on a daily basis as opposed to those who have tried vaping remains minuscule.
The most effective way to stop children using adult products is to enforce the age of purchase laws already on the books, which in the case of California is 21.
But in the name of public health, these Bay Area ordinances would ban safer flavored vapor products for adults while regular cigarettes can be bought and sold just as freely as before.
In San Leandro, however, thanks to a host of small business owners and tobacco harm-reduction advocates who turned out to make the case against the ban, the city council actually listened to the strength of the arguments presented and decided to knock the ban back to the rules committee.
Vice Mayor Lee Thomas even took the rare and admirable step of actually asking for more information about vapor products, an openness to information that is often in short supply when it comes to issues around tobacco and harm reduction.
Supervisors in San Francisco and city council members in Oakland would do well to look not just to San Leandro but to the Bay Area’s own proud history of championing effective harm-reduction policies over abstinence-only prohibition.
Guy Bentley (@gbentley1) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a consumer freedom research associate at the Reason Foundation and was previously a reporter for the Daily Caller.
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