San Francisco Asserted War on Cigarettes

Published on August 18, 2009 4:55 AM

San Francisco is another city which asserted war on cigarettes. The city of San Francisco, often the renegade, many times the trend-setter, became the first city in the nation to ban the sale of tobacco products in pharmacies.

The city said that pharmacies should be a place where sick people get their prescriptions filled and shouldn't be faced with cancer-causing products sitting nearby.
Soon the city’s faith will be decided by the judge. The City Attorney's Office will defend a legislation passed last year that bans the sale of tobacco in San Francisco pharmacies.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the argument after tobacco seller Philip Morris lost a December resolution to ban the cigarettes. The company said it violated its First Amendment right to free speech.

Dennis Herrera, City Attorney, said: "Consumers ought to have a wise hope that drugstores will serve their health needs, not enable their deadliest habits."

Life for tobacco smokers in the City has been getting more difficult lately. In May, the Board of Supervisors voted to add a 33 cent tax to each pack of cigarettes sold in San Francisco for to clean up cigarette butts left on the street.

Mayor Gavin Newsom added: "Cigarette butts contain benzene and toxic heavy metals that can poison the marine environment and leach into groundwater. All litter creates unnecessary costs for the city and its taxpayers. Cigarette butts are a big part of the problem."

It’s true that, as the anti-smoking activist William Cahan pointed out on a CNN talk show several years ago, "People who are making decisions for themselves don’t always come up with the right answer." They don’t certainly make tradeoffs between health and other values in an informed or carefully considered manner. Sometimes they regret their decisions. But they know their own tastes and preferences, and they have access to innumerable pieces of local information about the relevant costs and benefits that no government regulator can possibly know.

They will not always make good decisions, but on balance they will make better decisions, as measured by their own subsequent evaluations, than any third party deciding for them.
Anti-tobacco researchers also found that San Francisco spends $44,282,843 per year picking up trash, and $10,694,425 per year is directly imputable to cigarette litter.

Eventually, we must recognize these types of bans for what they are – an act of those who are pompous enough to believe others’ well-being is their business and deluded enough to think they are in a better position to make these value judgments than the individual involved. The result is a further expansion of government power in an era when the threat to civil liberties and personal freedom from such intrusions gets bigger every day.