This Famous City Is the First to Ban Tobacco Sales

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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This Famous City Is the First to Ban Tobacco Sales

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Many cities have bans on cigarette use in public places, including outdoors. While chewing tobacco may not exactly be included in the same way, few people use it, and there is the problem of what to do with it when it is done being chewed. One of America’s most famous cities has eliminated tobacco sales completely, as American municipalities make tobacco use and purchases harder and harder.

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Beverly Hills will have complete ban on tobacco sales as of January 1, 2021. Its city council calls it a “landmark decision.” There are a very limited number of exceptions:

A permanent exemption/carve out for existing cigar lounges;
Effective January 1, 2021, hotels, existing and future, may only sell to guests;
Effective January 1, 2021, all other businesses shall stop selling tobacco products;
A hardship exemption provision for retailers that demonstrate the ban would cause undue hardship

The council will review any effect on tourism in three years.

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Bans on smoking are in place in 5,100 municipalities in the United States. The list grows by the year. The American NonSmokers’ Rights Foundation claims, “Currently, 25 states, along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, have laws in effect that require all non-hospitality workplaces, restaurants, and bars to be 100% smokefree.” California is already near the bottom of the list of states with the most smokers.

The movement has decimated the tobacco industry in the United States. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research shows that tobacco sales have continued to decline recently.

Smoking is still the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States. It causes about 480,000 deaths, and more than 16 million Americans suffer from diseases caused by smoking. Heart disease is high on the lists of these maladies. However, California is not among the states with the most heart disease.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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