Catherine Ho
July 2, 2019
San Francisco Chronicle
The Juul-backed campaign to secure a ballot initiative to overturn San Francisco’s just-passed ban on e-cigarette sales has collected enough signatures to go before voters in the November election, the campaign said Tuesday.
If passed, the initiative would override the ban and allow Juul to continue selling its lucrative vaping devices and nicotine “pods” in the company’s hometown of San Francisco, while enacting some new regulations on brick-and-mortar and online retailers that sell the products.
The campaign, called the Coalition for Reasonable Vaping Regulation, has collected about 20,000 signatures — more than double the 9,485 it needed to qualify for the ballot, said Nate Allbee, a spokesman for the campaign. It is expected to be sufficient to get the proposal on the ballot.
The Department of Elections received the signatures from the vaping coalition Tuesday and now has 30 days to verify them, said Matthew Selby, the department’s campaign services division manager.
To do so, the department does a raw count of the signatures and then checks whether the voter’s address and signature match those on file with voter registration information.
Juul has committed to spend $500,000 on the campaign, according to city records. The company has teamed up with business groups including the Hispanic Chambers of Commerce of San Francisco, which also oppose the e-cigarette ban, and local adult vapers who say the product has helped them quit their longtime cigarette habit.
The legislation halting the sale of e-cigarettes was co-authored by City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Supervisor Shamann Walton, with the aim of curbing rising rates of youth vaping — a phenomenon that has picked up steam the last few years in part due to the popularity of Juul, Suorin and other vaping products that contain fruit- and dessert-flavored nicotine.
The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the legislation last month, drawing both praise and sharp criticism, and Mayor London Breed signed the bill on Friday. The ban will take seven months to be phased in.
Some public health researchers, parents and the American Heart Association applauded the effort to reduce teen e-cigarette use, while business groups, smoke shop owners, adult vapers and the e-cigarette industry say an all-out prohibition would take freedom of choice from adults over 21 who should be entitled to buy the products.
The Juul-backed ballot initiative has also drawn criticism from tobacco control advocates who say the company’s attempt to trump the local ban in order to continue selling its products is reminiscent of actions the tobacco industry has long taken to protect its profits. Juul recently accepted a $12.8 billion investment from Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, a deal that gives the tobacco giant a 35% stake in Juul.
Juul said the initiative, called “An Act to Prevent Youth Use of Vapor Products,” is meant to make it harder for people under 21 to buy vapes. The legal age in California to buy e-cigarettes or any tobacco product is already 21.
The ballot measure would limit the number of vaping devices and nicotine cartridges a person can buy to two devices and 20 cartridges at one time in brick-and-mortar stores, and two devices and 60 milliliters of nicotine liquid — equivalent to 85 Juul pods at 0.7 milliliters each — from online retailers per month. It would also require online retailers that sell to San Francisco customers to get permits to sell e-cigarettes, similar to the permitting system in place for brick-and-mortar retailers in the city.
The measure would also require brick-and-mortar retailers to use age verification technology to scan ID cards to validate authenticity and age. Retailers are already required to check ID for customers trying to buy tobacco products, but not all use scanning technology, which would block the transaction if the ID is not cleared by the system. Juul CEO Kevin Burns has offered to pay to install the scanning system at all 800 tobacco retailers in San Francisco. It has thus far been installed at 12 tobacco retailers in San Francisco and will be in 50 retailers by August, Juul said.
Other provisions Juul proposes in the initiative are already essentially the law, such as requiring stores to put e-cigarettes in a lockbox; state law already prohibits retailers from displaying cigarettes in a way that allows customers to access them directly.
“Our view is the Board of Supervisors overreached,” Allbee said. “We think with those regulations, we’ll be able to stop the increase in underage vaping but at the same time allow people who want to use these products to stop smoking.”
Walton, whose district includes Juul’s corporate headquarters, called Juul’s efforts to defeat the ban legislation “despicable.”
“This is not a surprise,” Walton said. “We always knew that Juul and the tobacco industry would go to any length possible to continue aggressively targeting our children and ensuring they create a new generation of young people addicted to nicotine.”
Juul’s internal polling data indicates 40% of San Franciscans support a ban on e-cigarettes and 51% oppose it, according to a survey of 800 registered San Francisco voters conducted over three days in April.
A campaign to fight the Juul ballot measure is already starting to form. It is expected to include many of the same organizations that similarly fought tobacco companies last year when the industry tried to overturn a San Francisco ordinance banning flavored tobacco products, said Larry Tramutola, the political consultant leading the effort.
The campaign will seek to preserve the city’s e-cigarette ban and flavored tobacco ban, the latter of which tobacco control advocates say the Juul measure could potentially gut.
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