California Cities Remove Tobacco From Stores

Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach removed tobacco products from all store shelves on Jan. 1, becoming the only jurisdictions in the U.S. to eliminate the sale of commercial tobacco. Both cities included a phase-out period to allow retailers to adjust and to help smokers quit.

“Somebody’s got to be first, so let it be us,” said John Mirisch, council member and ex-mayor of Beverly Hills, who first proposed the concept in 2017 when debating the banning of flavorings in tobacco products, according to Action on Smoking and Health.

Mirisch recently joined the Board of Trustees of the advocacy group Action on Smoking & Health (ASH), which coordinates Project Sunset, an effort to phase out tobacco sales worldwide.

“Cigarettes have become so normalized that to some this might seem like a drastic step,” said Chris Bostic, ASH Policy Director. “But if another product emerged tomorrow that was highly addictive and killed when used as intended, of course we’d ban its sale. We’d probably charge the people who marketed it with manslaughter too.”

While Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach are the first in the U.S. to pass legislation, the idea of eliminating tobacco sales is not new. When Surgeon General Luther Terry released a landmark report connecting tobacco use to death and disease in 1964, he was convinced that the sale of cigarettes would be outlawed, holding the press conference on a Saturday to lessen the impact on the stock market.

The concept has been gaining traction more recently, within the public health community and more broadly. The Danish Institute for Human Rights, after concluding a human rights assessment of Philip Morris International in 2017, concluded that “there can be no doubt that the production and marketing of tobacco is irreconcilable with the human right to health. For the tobacco industry, the UNGPs [United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights] therefore require the cessation of the production and marketing of tobacco.”

At its most recent world conference, the global tobacco control community adopted The Cape Town Declaration on Human Rights and a Tobacco-Free World.