The Denver City Council voted Monday to ban sales of nearly all flavored tobacco and nicotine products in city limits.
The council majority brushed aside arguments from convenience store and smoke shop owners facing potentially steep revenue losses and warnings about the potential of a black market forming for flavored products. Instead, they heeded calls from public health and children’s advocates who have decried products like strawberry mango e-cigarettes as lures that can draw young people into lifetimes of addiction.
“By supporting this ban, we are not pretending to solve every problem (but) we are creating more distance between something that hurts our children,” Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez said. “I have seen firsthand how tobacco products, especially when introduced at a young age, can shape a lifetime of struggle.”
Monday’s decisive 11-1 vote came three years and 10 days after a previous iteration of the council voted to approve a flavored tobacco ban of its own. Then-Mayor Michael Hancock vetoed the council’s 2021 ban, citing the negative impact on small businesses as part of the rationale behind his opposition.
This time, Mayor Mike Johnston has signaled his full support. His administration has described it as a critical public health policy — though his signature is not yet on the passed bill.
The lone no vote came from Councilman Kevin Flynn who doubled down on his belief that his colleagues’ decision will not prevent young people in Denver from obtaining products that remain legal in many surrounding communities.
Denver police officials testified in a committee hearing earlier this month that the department is not concerned about a black market forming around flavored tobacco and in fact, convenience stores may be less desirable targets for theft if they stop carrying those products. But Flynn was steadfast Monday.
“Bans create black markets. We know this is always true,” Flynn said. “Someone will buy this in Lakewood, bring it into Denver and sell it at a premium.”
But Councilman Darrell Watson, one of the ban’s three co-sponsors pushed back. Data from every state and municipality with similar bans has shown a decrease in youth access, Watson said.
During a public hearing, the council heard from medical professionals including epidemiologist Tessa Crume.
“The tobacco industry must secure its financial future by being forward thinking and understanding who its customers of tomorrow will be,” Crume said of the industry’s focus on protecting flavored offerings. “Nicotine as a drug, regardless of its delivery mechanism, drives repeated use and dependence much like cocaine and heroin.”
Crume’s grim description came opposite speakers who identified as former law enforcement agents who issued dire warnings about the risk of rising crime should the ban pass. Those included Carlos Sandoval who suggested that criminal organizations in other countries will see tobacco as a low-risk profit opportunity.
“Cartels bring e-cigarettes across the border,” Sandoval said. “Cartels and organized crime will grow stronger under prohibition in Denver.”
Dharminder Singh, a retailer with multiple locations that sell flavored tobacco products in Denver, suggested that the city is being hypocritical by going after nicotine when retail marijuana is legal citywide.
“We are promoting things that are more dangerous to society, and we are taking away things that are legalized,” he said.
Other retailers slammed councilmembers for what they described as a rushed process that did not leave room for negotiation or collaboration with law-abiding shop owners.
But Watson noted that he and his colleague spent eight months working on the ban, including more than 50 meetings with stakeholders and even paused the council approval process through the month of November. That pause resulted in hookah tobacco being exempted from the ban because of its significance to people from Middle Eastern and North African cultures.
The ban drew a significant lobbying effort from tobacco companies and groups that represent retailers large and small. In ads placed in The Denver Post, one lobbying group backed by tobacco industry giant Philip Morris International decried the potential sales tax losses to the city.
But during testimony at the committee level on Dec. 4, Donna Lynne, the CEO of Denver Health hospital, noted taxpayers often bear a majority of the long-term cost of the health impacts of tobacco and nicotine use.
Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez cited Lynne in her closing arguments in favor of the ban.
“When we talk about economic impact, that is what we’re talking about,” she said.
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