Juul adds $1 million to bid to kill S.F. ecigarette ban
Juul has funneled another $1 million into a local campaign to overturn San Francisco’s ban on ecigarette sales — bringing the vaping company’s spending on a ballot measure that would kill the ban to $1.5 million.
The Juulbacked Coalition for Reasonable Vaping Regulation recently filed an updated campaign statement with the city’s Ethics Commission indicating the new infusion of money.
The coalition is sponsoring a ballot initiative that will go before voters in November that would overturn the Board of Supervisors’ recently passed legislation prohibiting the sale of ecigarettes. The ballot measure would allow Juul to continue selling its vaping devices and nicotine cartridges in its hometown. The San Francisco Department of Elections on Wednesday certified the signatures collected by the campaign, guaranteeing the measure will appear on the ballot.
The coalition has spent about $126,000 on the Washington, D.C., firm Lincoln Park Strategies for polling and surveys and $30,000 on campaign consultants at Oakland’s Whitehurt Mosher.
Juul said the ballot measure is meant to make it hard for people under 21, the legal age to buy tobacco products in California, to buy vaping products. It would impose limits on how many devices and nicotine cartridges can be bought in a single transaction, create a permitting program for online ecigarette sellers and require stores to use age verification technology to validate customers’ ID cards.
“Juul is a San Francisco company with thousands of San Francisco employees,” said Nate Allbee, spokesman for the coalition backed by the company. “It makes sense that they’re taking a leadership role in this campaign.”