Davis poised to ban sale of flavored tobacco products, following similar Yolo County ban

The city of Davis is poised to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products, following similar bans across the Sacramento region, including Yolo County and the city of Sacramento.

Under the proposed ordinance, the sale of flavored tobacco or nicotine items — including menthol cigarettes, e-cigarettes cartridges, cigars and pipe tobacco — would be banned inside city limits starting June 1. Using or owning flavored tobacco products, as well as non-tobacco products such as cannabis, would still be legal.

There are about 21 businesses in Davis that sell tobacco and tobacco products, according to city staff reports.

The proposed ban comes as municipalities across the country try to curb tobacco use and nicotine addiction among kids by making products with sweet flavors harder to get. Flavors “reduce the normal harsh taste of tobacco, which creates a false impression to the younger population,” said Karri Halcomb, Yolo County’s youth tobacco coalition coordinator.

“We need to do this on a jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction basis, that’s how many state laws in California have been ultimately crafted,” Lucas Frerichs said during last month’s meeting, “where you have 400 and some individual local ordinances that essentially recreate the notion of a statewide ban.”

Four out of five 12- to 17-year-olds who have ever used tobacco started use with a flavored product, according to the California Department of Public Health. In 2018, there were 1.5 million more youth e-cigarette users than the prior year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

Earlier this year, Davis Joint Unified School District joined several districts nationwide in a lawsuit against Juul, the leading tobacco vaporizer company, for its role in “cultivating and fostering an e-cigarette epidemic.”

“Several years ago, we really didn’t see much of a problem with tobacco use in our schools in Davis,” Cindy Pickett, president of the district’s board of education, told Davis City Council last month.

“But the last year, two years, it’s been really an epidemic,” she said. “The dollars that we should be spending on classroom instruction, on teachers is going towards trying to police this activity.

Tobacco shop owners say a ban on the sale of flavor tobacco products would irreparably damage their businesses, and argue that it would fail to address the main way teens acquire products — online, or illegally on the black market.

Mohammad Alkhtib, owner of Illusions Smoke Shop, which has been at its Davis location for nearly a decade, said about half of his business is tied to flavored tobacco products, like pods for vape pens and tobacco for hookah.

“Kids can’t buy a hookah and take it to school,” he said. “I don’t want kids to smoke but that’s a parenting issue. Sadly, we’re paying for that as retailers.”

He said the June start date would be too soon for smoke shop owners to sell their remaining inventory, and would prefer have the ban become effective next January, since he and other vendors already purchased their annual license to sell tobacco products.

The ordinance language would be similar to the policy set by Yolo County, which banned the sale of flavored tobacco products within unincorporated areas in 2016. Woodland and West Sacramento have since passed similar bans, set to go in effect in April of this year.

The city of Sacramento also banned the sale of flavored tobacco products this past January, after intense pleas from vape shop owners for exemptions.

The Davis City Council discussed the proposed ordinance during a meeting last month and is set to vote on the ban March 24.