Editorial: Sonoma should bogart County’s cigarette-pricing regulation

The new anti-tobacco regulations were touted primarily as efforts to stamp out underage smoking.|

Things you can buy for less than $7:

A vodka gimlet at Steiners.

Two-pack of glide floss at CVS.

Three bottles of Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw (we recommend the Valdiguie).

Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” on Amazon Kindle.

Now here’s one thing you can’t buy for less than $7: Pack o’ smokes.

That’ll be the case, anyway, as of Jan. 1, 2018 – thanks to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, which on Tuesday unanimously approved an ambitious new $7 price floor for cigarettes in an effort to curb the deadly addiction. Additionally, the plan also defines electronic cigarettes as tobacco products and will require retailers – about 140 in the unincorporated parts of the county – to obtain county-issued licenses to sell tobacco. The latter two moves are patterned after a City of Sonoma ordinance approved last year.

The new anti-tobacco regulations were touted primarily as efforts to stamp out underage smoking, as the new price floor might push county youth toward making the unenviable choice of giving up smoking en lieu of getting a part-time job to pay for a pack-a-day habit. Any hopes that $7 a pack would dissuade adults – when a 20-shot of Lucky Strikes can set you back from $4 to $6 – were probably smothered with Gov. Brown’s announcement of the plan to raise the state minimum wage to $15 by 2020. That extra hourly cash on the horizon will certainly soften the blow to plenty of Pall Mall loyalists in the 707 area code.

While tobacco industry lobbyists are known to make appearances at supervisor and council meetings whenever municipalities consider tightening the reins on their perfectly legal product, the primary blowback against such initiatives are the local cigarette retailers themselves who, hyperbolically or not, say their livelihoods would be damaged if such chokeholds were placed on cigarette sales.

Empathy for the plights of such small-business owners runs shorter than the breath of a 40-year-old emphysema sufferer. Their attempts to abate stricter regulations, after all, are essentially an appeal to more easily sell a product that, at best, causes addiction and, at worst, turns their customers’ lungs a rusty charcoal grey with a smattering of malignant whitish-brown spots.

Ironically, after so much lip service was paid last year about how Sonoma’s tobacco regulations would send smokers outside the city to feed their habit, the County’s new pricing could bring that very business back into town.

It’s not exactly a client base Sonoma should be encouraging.

Which is why the Sonoma City Council should consider wafting even further into the ether than it already has – the city is now in the middle of reworking its second-hand smoke restrictions – and also bump its single-pack price floor to $7.

Such a move would add one more thing to the list of what you can buy for $7: A few more lives.

Email Jason at jason.walsh@sonomanews.com.

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