D.C. City Council Ignores Critical Information With 2021 Flavor Ban

The Washington D.C. city council recently approved legislation that would ban the sale of flavored tobacco products, including flavored cigarettes, cigars, and vapor products. Deplorably, the city council has bypassed public input and has determined that no public hearing will be heard on this years’ legislation.  Instead, the city council inexplicably relied on public testimony from 2020 as sufficient for this years’ ban. As well as not hearing testimony this year, two of the members of the D.C. city council began their terms in 2021 and were not privy to last year’s testimony. Not only is this denying the public opportunity to voice their concerns, it is damning to the legislative process as the council is relying on information from previous terms and disregarding information and research from the last year.

Like lawmakers around the country, the D.C. city council is attempting to address youth vaping by banning all tobacco products. D.C. already has low rate of both youth tobacco and vapor use. For example, in 2019, only 5.3 percent of D.C. high school students reported current cigarette use, a 53.5 percent decrease from 2007 when 11.4 percent reported using cigarettes on at least one occasion in the past 30 days. Further, only 13 percent of high school students reported current e-cigarette use in 2019, far lower than the national of 32.7 percent.

Moreover, the D.C. city council is ignoring the fact that e-cigarettes have effectively reduced smoking rates among young adults. E-cigarettes’ emerged in all U.S. markets between 2009 and 2012, and in the years after e-cigarette’s market emergence, smoking rates among D.C. adults aged 18 to 24 years old decreased by 56.9 percent. Conversely, in the years after suing tobacco manufacturers (which was thought to reduce cigarette use), smoking rates among the same age group decreased by only 13 percent.

If lawmakers in the nation’s capital truly cared about reducing youth tobacco and vapor product use, they ought to use more of existing funding on tobacco control programs, including education, prevention, and cessation, rather than lawsuits.

In 2019, D.C. collected $40.6 million in tobacco settlement payments and $27.4 million in cigarette taxes, but only allocated $1.9 million towards tobacco control programs. For every dollar the city received attributed to cigarettes, DC spent only 2.7 cents on tobacco control programs. Between 2000 and 2019, D.C. collected $1.309 billion in cigarette taxes and settlement payments, yet only spent $17.4 million – or 1.3 percent – on prevention measures.

While D.C. spends a dismal amount of existing tobacco monies to address youth tobacco and vapor use, a flavor ban would eliminate more of that revenue, as has been evidenced in current statewide flavor bans. In 2020, Massachusetts banned the sale of flavored tobacco and vapor products, including menthol cigarettes.  Massachusetts is estimated to lose $120 million in cigarette revenue. People have not quit smoking – they have simply traveled to surrounding areas to make their purchases. According to the Tax Foundation, sales of cigarettes “skyrocketed” in New Hampshire and Rhode Island – growing 34 percent and 25 percent, respectively, between June 2019 and June 2020.

All the states surrounding D.C. allow for the sale of flavored tobacco products, and residents of D.C. are likely to travel to Virginia or Maryland to purchase such products. Virginia has long been a bastion to cigarette smugglers, with many people being arrested over the years for smuggling low-taxed cigarettes bought in Virginia and transported to high-taxed places, such as New York. In 2020, a Virginia man plead guilty to trafficking charges and admitted to selling more than $5.1 million in cigarettes. Banning flavored tobacco products in D.C. would allow such criminal enterprises to flourish as they would no longer have to travel so far north.

Statewide flavor bans have already led to arrests of such criminals. Just two days after the D.C. city council voted to approve the ban, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy announced the arrest and arraignment of a New Hampshire man that “was illegally trafficking marijuana and illegally distributing untaxed tobacco and electronic nicotine delivery systems … the majority of which were counterfeit and flavored.”

And, just a few days after the D.C. city council voted on a flavored tobacco ban, there was an altercation between a police officer and a teenager that was accused of vaping at the Ocean City Boardwalk. Videos of the encounter have gone viral, and although the ban D.C. has put in place does not ban possession of flavored tobacco and vapor products, the ban will undoubtedly lead to more police interactions. Section 47-2405 of D.C. code permits both imprisonment and a fine for any person that is – not a consumer – and is caught “transporting” untaxed cigarettes “over the public highways, roads, streets, waterways, or other public space of the District.”

Legislation at any level should never bypass public input, and it should be inexcusable for D.C. lawmakers to not allow public comment on this years’ flavor ban, regardless of how many times the city council has heard testimony in previous years. Ultimately, it is the residents of D.C., including adult smokers and small business owners, who will be harmed by this prohibitionist policy, but they aren’t even allowed to tell their lawmakers about that.

Lindsey Stroud is Director of Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center.