Regarding the Vallejo Tobacco Retail License I’ve been working on for two years, our coalition had numerous opportunities to speak at a community workshop with tobacco retailers. As you can see in the video it sometimes got heated, but everyone remained civil. I had an opportunity to stand up numerous times and give my point of view on the work we’ve done with this, particularly since I’m a resident and all my activism in this area is as a volunteer.

The two issues the retailers supposedly had were pack size and transferability, and they obviously weren’t amenable to my repeated suggestion of foregoing their opportunity to transfer the business as a penalty for violating the already existing law of selling to minors.  Because it wasn’t a hill they were willing to die on, I don’t see why we need to negotiate the ABC model for liquor.  The liquor model doesn’t scare them much.  Suspension of even one month (and forfeiture of the poison product, which was listed) scares them.  The false equivalency of tobacco and alcohol was what got me most frustrated last night, but I did find the retailers at our table to be cordial.  They admitted they had lost members of their own families to cancer, presumably from smoking.

That being said, I find it hypocritical that retailers swear they don’t sell to minors and yet they want “a break” in case it happens.  The retailers at my table voluntarily admitted they were already caught selling liquor to minors and were punished for it.  When pushed by me they claimed they could not swear their stores would not accidentally sell tobacco to minors, which means they have historically been laissez-faire about checking identification.  That translates to me that they aren’t all the good guys they were purporting to be.

The audacity that retailers claimed THEY are the best judges of how much addiction is going on in the community is absolutely absurd and based on nothing concrete.  Those claiming they were the best “experts” on that didn’t want to hear about what kind of empirical evidence actually improved the outcomes of the tobacco scourge in other jurisdictions.

All the talk about the black market was also a red herring.  Anyone who resorts to saying someone else is breaking the law as a reason not to try to create an enforcement of a law already on the books, has already lost the argument to me and is not worth sparring with.  Someone even had the guts to imply that they would be subject to more armed robberies if we increased the price, as if tobacco products are worth their weight in gold.

I stand by the ordinance as it was modeled after the Public Health Law Center. TRL’s already exist in well over 200 jurisdictions in California alone, including next door in Benicia, not to mention other states.