Stores given a year to comply with tobacco ban
The City Council on Tuesday night approved a citywide ban on all tobacco products beginning on January 1, 2021.
After three meetings featuring extensive testimony from education and public health leaders and local residents overwhelmingly in favor of the ban, the council followed up on an emergency ordinance passed in October that banned vaping and flavored tobacco products with a total tobacco ban. Councilmembers expressed sympathy for the 17 local businesses that will be economically impacted, but a majority said public health outweighed financial concerns.
“This is not an easy decision,” Councilperson Steve Napolitano said. “People’s lives and finances are going to be impacted. I hope lots of lives can be positively impacted as well…It’s often said, ‘This is a legal product.’ Well, that’s because there have been years and millions of dollars buying political influence to keep it legal. It has been the single deadliest consumer product in history.”
“Someone said, ‘Let’s make history.’ I’m not interested in making history. I’m interested in doing the right thing.”
The Council had signaled its intention to enact a total ban in October but had not defined a timeline. The January 2021 timeline gives local businesses a year to adapt, and aligns with a similar ban adopted by Beverly Hills.
Councilperson Suzanne Hadley was the lone dissenting vote.
“To me, this is not a public health issue,” Hadley said. “To me, this is a freedom issue. And do adults have the right to make decisions for themselves and their family and their personal lives….I’m not here to stick up for tobacco. I would also say none of us was elected to drive tobacco out of Manhattan Beach. I certainly never heard about it in the last election. I wasn’t elected to be a king or a dictator or wave my magic wand and ban cellphone use by 5-year-olds and divorce and yelling at your kids in the supermarket and aggressive spanking. There are lots and lots of stuff I have a problem with how people live their lives, but I was elected on City Council first to do no harm.”
Heather Kim, the owner of Current Events, a downtown newsstand which also sells tobacco products, said her business would be immensely harmed.
“I’m a mother of four kids,” she said. “I was raised to not smoke, not do drugs. So that’s how I turned out. I’m doing that with my own children right now. I believe it starts at home, and it doesn’t take City Council members to raise my kids…I couldn’t unload this business if I wanted to at this point. When someone buys a business they buy based on the sales that it can produce. And when we purchased it, it was because we could sell tobacco, because there is a need and want for it in the community.”
Tomas Torices, the executive director of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Southern California, said it took 41 years to reduce tobacco use in the United States, and all of that is being undone by the industry’s effective campaign to promote vaping.
“The tobacco industry has targeted our youth and flavors are trapping them to life-long nicotine addiction,” he said. “I personally understand some people have legitimate financial concerns and proposing their reasons why a ban should not happen in the city. However, we also all know tobacco-related illnesses are responsible for about 380,000 premature deaths. And that is greater than the sum of alcohol, HIV, [and] motorcycle accidents. It is a major cause of death in the United States. I feel we cannot leave the fate of generations to come to the selfish desires of a few.”
Councilperson Richard Montgomery said he sympathized with “the little guy” as a small business person himself, but that the larger interests of the community took precedence. He also said the total ban makes enforceability more achievable, comparing it to the ban on smoking in multi-family residences and public spaces enacted 11 years ago yet was not enforceable.
“Good intentions are no excuse for bad public policy,” Montgomery said.
The council gave direction to staff to provide assistance in helping existing tobacco retailers transition over the next year.