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Cartoon Cigarette
In early October, the St. Paul City Council considered an ordinance that would create new restrictions on tobacco and vape sales, setting a $10 minimum price on a pack of cigarettes, banning coupons and other retail discounts, and gradually reducing the number of tobacco retail licenses in the city, among other things. If enacted, the ordinance would establish some of the toughest tobacco restrictions in the country in St. Paul.
The council drafted the ordinance in partnership with the St.Paul–based nonprofit Association of Non-Smokers. Councilmember Nelsie Yang pointed to the tobacco industry’s targeting of people of color and working class communities as a reason to tighten restrictions. The ordinance would also set a distance between tobacco retailers of at least one half-mile.
“I think about my own lived experiences, growing up in middle school, high school, and seeing my own classmates start smoking at a really young age, many of them being people of color,” said Yang, who represents Ward 6 on St. Paul’s east side. “This is about taking back our community, and ensuring that they can live in a community that is thriving in terms of health, in terms of being able to walk down the street and to not see so many tobacco shops all around you, and to be able to live in a dignified community overall.”
The ordinance would also increase the penalties for selling tobacco to those under 21, from $200 to $500 for a first-time offense and from $400 to $1,000 for a second-time offense, and prohibit liquor stores from selling flavored tobacco products, including menthol. These provisions are aimed in part at curbing smoking and vaping among young people: Though cigarette use among high schoolers declined significantly from 9.6 percent in 2017 to 3.2 percent in 2020, vaping—using e-cigarettes—among teens has increased steeply since 2016. (However, teen vaping plummeted during the pandemic with school closures.)
Minnesota has a long history of comprehensive tobacco control, starting with the Association of Non-Smoker’s founding in 1973 and the first “D-Day” (Don’t Smoke Day) in Monticello in 1974. St. Paul established itself as a leader on tobacco control with its 2004 indoor smoking ban.
There are some precedents for the ordinance’s proposed restrictions: New York City has a cigarette pack price minimum of $13, and the city council of Providence, Rhode Island, banned both flavored tobacco products and discounts. But the leads of several retail trade associations submitted a letter to the council expressing their concerns that there isn’t sufficient evidence that the proposed restrictions actually work to reduce smoking rates. They asked that the minimum cigarette price and discount provisions of the ordinance be removed.
“When was the last time that you saw an underage youth attempt to use a coupon to purchase any product, let alone cigarettes? This simply does not happen. All this provision will do is raise the cost of legal tobacco products to St. Paul residents,” wrote the letter’s authors, who say they’re also concerned that a $10 price minimum will hurt low-income consumers.
St. Paul’s new tobacco ordinance is set for a public hearing October 20, followed by an October 27 vote. However, all seven city councilmembers have signed on as co-sponsors, suggesting that the ordinance is almost guaranteed to pass.
