Let’s say a government agency pays for a study and is involved in the study’s design, data collection, analysis, writing, and interpretation. Would you find it plausible that the agency had zero influence on the study’s results?
Last year, the academic journal Tobacco Control published just such a study, investigating what happened when Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach became the first U.S. cities to ban the sale of all tobacco products within their city limits.
The study sought to determine the impact these bans had on sales of tobacco and non-tobacco products in the cities themselves and in surrounding neighborhoods. The report was funded by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), and its co-author, Nita H. Mukand, also received a National Institutes of Health grant.
The research examined only chain stores, which account for a mere 16 percent of California’s cigarette sales. The sample comprised just seven retailers in two of Southern California’s wealthiest zip codes, which already had among the lowest rates of tobacco use in the state.
The Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach tobacco bans being studied went into effect on January 1, 2021, when California was still operating under some of the country’s strictest COVID-19 rules. Despite the unrepresentative nature of these cities, their residents and the way the pandemic shutdowns changed what we could do, the study’s authors still concluded that their “results suggest the viability of tobacco sales bans as an effective tobacco control strategy.”
At a seminar on the tobacco ban study’s findings, Adam Leventhal, professor of public health sciences at the University of Southern California, told the authors, “This is kind of the logical end of the tobacco control policy spectrum. We have flavor bans, higher taxes and indoor smoking laws. But this is outright banning it.”
That points to the bigger picture, a decades-long effort to ban tobacco and nicotine products fully. ‘Endgame’ is the anti-tobacco movement’s term for prohibiting all commercial tobacco products: cigarettes, cigars, nicotine pouches, e-cigarettes, hookahs, pipe tobacco, and heated tobacco products.
Some of these products are authorized for sale by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as harm reduction tools because they’re safer than cigarettes and help smokers quit. But CDPH’s ultimate goal isn’t just to reduce death and disease from smoking; it wants an almost completely nicotine-free California.
The state has already banned the sale of most flavored tobacco products. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office finds “the annual revenue loss from the flavor ban might be around $300 million to $400 million.”
But the California Youth Tobacco Survey did not find a significant decline in teens using flavored tobacco products in the year after the state flavor ban was implemented, suggesting sales may have moved to the black market.
I recently reported in Reason magazine how CDPH officials are co-designing tobacco polls with private- and nonprofit-sector anti-tobacco activists, sharing confidential data under conditions of secrecy, and embedding public employees in working groups whose explicit purpose is to develop messaging for tobacco prohibition efforts.
In a recent training webinar, the state-funded consultant leading one of these efforts described blanketing a neighborhood with flyers “to give the illusion,” as he put it, “that the public was demanding that the city council take action” on the tobacco ban.
These activities are not what come to mind when voters think of what they want taxpayer-funded state public health officials to do on the job.
There’s nothing nefarious about private sector advocacy organizations raising money and engaging lawmakers on whatever issue they choose. But taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund activists who mask lobbying campaigns as educational efforts, as is happening with these local bans.
Instead of pursuing ideological bans on all tobacco products that push people to black markets, state health officials should prioritize proven, pragmatic harm reduction policies that can reduce tobacco-related deaths and improve public health.
Guy Bentley is director of consumer freedom research at Reason Foundation.