Flavored tobacco bans won’t achieve desired outcomes
I support efforts to curb underage tobacco use, but only when they work, and only when they do so without hurting people they are claiming to help. By contrast, Los Angeles councilmembers are expected to introduce a ban on flavored tobacco products on June 16th. I urge the community I have lived and served in to make our voices heard and oppose these efforts, which have been proven to be both ineffective and detrimental to some of our most vulnerable residents.
Criminalizing flavored tobacco creates more opportunities for conflict with police in communities of color, where police-community relations are already suffering. Flavored cigarettes, particularly menthol cigarettes, are favored by Black smokers, while most white smokers tend to prefer unflavored tobacco. To draw up a ban against products favored by people of color, while leaving those favored by white people completely legal, seems not only unjust but remarkably insensitive at a time when Americans everywhere are working to overcome racial injustices in our communities and institutions.
Banning consumable substances that have health risks has been tried before, and we all know how that turned out. Both the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and our current War on Drugs led to no decrease in use, only illegal markets, violence, and – especially in the current era – vastly disparate racial impacts stemming from these policies.
As part of a comprehensive regulatory scheme, states already heavily tax cigarettes and other tobacco products. This has an important public health purpose, but it also provides a significant stream of government revenue that is used to fund crucial governmental programs, such as law enforcement and social services for marginalized people. Bans pressure sales underground, creating illegal markets that are worth billions of dollars but pay nothing in taxes.
The underground market can also lead to incidents like what happened last year, when a 14-year-old Black child in Rancho Cordova was chased, mounted, and assaulted by a police officer after buying a cigarillo from an adult. Giving another reason for police and communities, particularly communities of color, to feel hostility and distrust towards each other will only make us all less safe.
Just like the policies that ushered in the War on Drugs, flavored tobacco bans don’t even work to decrease smoking or underage use. According to a 2021 Yale School of Public Health study published in JAMA Pediatrics, there was a 30 percent increase in youth smoking after San Francisco banned flavored vapes. Abigail Freedman, the study’s author, said “Evidence that this policy was associated with increases in smoking among minors enrolled in high school suggests a need for caution.” San Francisco’s experience casts serious doubt on the idea that youth are only smoking because flavored tobacco tastes good.
Similarly, when Massachusetts lawmakers banned flavored tobacco products, they created a robust underground market without decreasing smoking, which the state’s Multi-Agency Illegal Tobacco Task Force warned in advance would happen. Shortly after the ban took effect, law enforcement leaders encouraged the state to repeal the law. In addition to the illegal in-state market created by the ban, consumers also moved across state lines and tobacco sales skyrocketed in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. Massachusetts lost $140 million in tax revenue over a year and a half.
On the other hand, we know that honest education, harm reduction, and access to smoking cessation tools reduce smoking for both children and adults. The CDC calls the staggering reduction in smoking rates one of the greatest public health achievements of the past 50 years.
Between 1997 and 2015, the percentage of high school students who had smoked a cigarette in the past month dropped from 36 percent to 11 percent. This 70 percent decrease came not because of bans, but through education, including public health campaigns that teach kids that smoking is dangerous and uncool. Offering adults already addicted to nicotine potentially safer alternatives to smoked tobacco also helps.
I know the City Council is acting with the best of intentions. However, from years of experience with similar legislation, we know that such bans create racially disparate outcomes, tensions in the community, and, ironically, the boom of illegal markets that make it easier for kids to buy tobacco.
Lt. Diane Goldstein (Ret.) is a 21-year police veteran from Redondo Beach, California, and executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), a nonprofit group of police and other criminal justice professionals who support evidence-based public safety policies.