Will tobacco ban burn businesses?
Merchants say city’s new array of mandates on tobacco sales will punish small business owners
WOONSOCKET – A two-pack of mango-flavored cigars costs just $1.49 at CT Plus Convenience Store, but proprietor Chaoubi “Charlie” Khalil says its going to cost him a lot more if the City Council bans the sale of flavored tobacco products.
Tobacco products account for just a small part of his business, says Khalil. But when customers come into the Hamlet Avenue shop to buy them, they typically purchase one or two other products at the same time, like a soda and snack.
If patrons can’t get the products they want at CT Plus, says Khalil, they’ll just spend their money in nearby Massachusetts – right over the border – and his losses won’t be confined to mere tobacco products.
“Why do you want to kill my business and give it to stores in Bellingham, Blackstone or even North Smithfield?” says Khalil. “It’s not fair.”
If all goes according to plan, however, the sale of flavored tobacco products will be outlawed in the city after July 1 – three months later than originally envisioned, thanks to some organized pushback from local merchants.
At the urging of the state Department of Health and the Woonsocket Prevention Coalition, the City Council passed a local ordinance last fall that would ban the sale of flavored cigars, e-liquids, snuff, or chewing, hookah and pipe tobaccos. Standard cigarettes are excluded from the ban.
The law also establishes a first-ever licensing fee of $75 a year for stores that sell tobacco products. Stores that run afoul of the ban could face fines ranging from $250 for a first offense, $500 for a
second and $750 for a third offense. Scofflaws could also have their license suspended or revoked.
Moreover, licensees would face several additional mandates, including a requirement to check the ID of any customer seeking to purchase a nicotine product who appears to be younger than 27 years old, even though anyone older than 18 can legally buy cigarettes. Vendors would also be compelled to display the prices of all tobacco products and they’d be prohibited from honoring any sort of coupon discount offered by the manufacturer.
The law was originally slated to take effect on April 1, but the City Council agreed to a three-month delay this week after lawyer Mark Smith, representing more than a dozen vendors in the city, argued that his clients had received insufficient advance notice of the proposed ban and they’d been deprived of an opportunity to provide feedback.
But Smith also hinted at a possible challenge of the ordinance, saying other communities have imposed limited restriction on the sale of flavored tobacco products, prohibiting them for sale, for example, near schools and play areas. An outright ban on the sale of flavored tobacco products for adults who are old enough to purchase them might not be legal, he suggested.
The council agreed to delay the implementation of the law for three months to give vendors a chance to liquidate their stocks of the products in question, but members gave no indication they intend to reconsider the ordinance.
Several members of the city council acknowledged that they should have done more to remind businesses that the ban was about to take effect and apologized for failing to do so, however.
The city was among three communities in the state that were singled out for praise by state Health Director Nicole Scott-Alexander last week, on the occasion of National Kick-Butts Day, for passing the law.
In Central Falls, West Warwick, and Woonsocket, groups of high school students worked with lawmakers to research how marketing flavors, like grape, cherry and bubble gum, is designed – they allege – to get kids hooked on tobacco products.
“Big tobacco continues to shamelessly target youth and lower income communities with their dangerous, highly addictive products,” said Alexander-Scott. “The brave, inspired students who worked with their governments in Central Falls, West Warwick, and Woonsocket to pass these measures have demonstrated their might in standing up to these companies and in helping to ensure that no one’s health in Rhode Island is determined by his or her zip code.”
Central Falls banned all flavored tobacco product sales and became the first city in the state to make 21 the legal age to buy tobacco products. It also restricted the number of tobacco retailers and their proximity to schools.
According to Daniel Fitzgerald, a National Youth Advocate for the Truth Initiative and a Substance Abuse Prevention Fellow with the Department of Behavioral HealthCare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals, 5.6 million children in the U.S. will die prematurely of tobacco-related illness, including 16,000 of them from Rhode Island.
“Tobacco addiction takes hold in the teenage years,” he said. “Nearly 90 percent of all adult smokers started smoking before age 19. Helping teens stay away from tobacco is the best way to prevent a lifetime of tobacco addiction, disease and death.”
Lisa Carcifero, executive director of the Woonsocket Prevention Coalition, said underage use of nicotine products has been well-documented among high school students in an anonymous, statewide poll known as the Rhode Island Student Survey. She said the data was presented to the city council during a work session when the ordinance as first proposed.
Carcifero said it’s plain that students under 18 are consuming nicotine products, but standard cigarettes are not the preferred delivery system.
“We know kids are looking for the flavors,” she said. “The adults are not going for those products. It’s really the kids. They’re the ones the products are being marketed to.”
One of the most disturbing revelations in the Rhode Island Student Survey is that kids say they buy tobacco products unlawfully in convenience stores, according to Carcifero.
“The other answer is, ‘I steal it,’” according to the coalition director.
Carcifero says tobacco manufacturers deliberately require certain products to be placed in vendors’ stores in specific areas precisely because the location is conducive to theft. The manufacturers, says Carcifero, are hoping young people take the bait because it’s another way for them to be introduced to nicotine.
At CT Plus, smokables are available in flavors like honey, white grape, pineapple – even “chicken and waffle.” But most of them aren’t particularly easy to spot – most are shelved behind the counter, close to the floor.
The store doesn’t sell any tobacco products to anyone under the legal age of 18, says Khalil.
Though he isn’t one of the vendors represented by Smith, Khalil echoes some of the same sentiments expressed by the lawyer. Even though patrons looking for flavored tobaccos could still obtain them at stores a short hop across the state line, he wouldn’t be so upset about a ban on their sale if it were statewide.
Such a ban might actually come closer to achieving the deterrent goals sought by DOH and the prevention coalitions, while maintaining a more level playing field for business. A ban confined to the city isn’t likely to accomplish much more than make the folks who are advocating it feel as if they’re making progress, but all they’re really doing is punishing their small business owners, he says.
“If they want to do something, why don’t they go down to the schools and catch the ones who are selling drugs?” he says.