Weed is legal in my city, but you can’t smoke it in public and most landlords ban it on their property, so if you’re a renter you basically can’t smoke it anywhere. But tobacco is usually fine.
1 Like
The problem is: it isn’t a home ETA house. It’s an apartment which means your actions directly effect others. Whether that be smoke, loud music, loud sex at 2am, etc.
4 Likes
the ordinance says, go smoke outside. but i wonder, is that possible in san francisco? in a lot of cities there are ordinances about smoking next to building entrances. in some places, it’s dense enough there’s basically no place to smoke nearby.
( ive also got to wonder the actual dangers of second hand smoking outside versus say the car pollution of being outside in a city. )
2 Likes
Conceptually I’m open to the idea, but in practice this just brings back a lot of the reasons the drug war is horrible. It creates a reason to put the police into contact with lower income residents at a vastly higher rate. A single 1,000 dollar fine is probably enough to toss a lot of low income people into an eviction spiral. They’ve just functionally made smoking illegal, but only if you are poor.
15 feet from building entrances, exits, windows, or vents.
10 Likes
Yeah, I hate smelling all smoke or vapor, but this is a stupid law. They should consider banning all smoke with the argument that while the chemical (nicotine or THC) might be legal, they can enforce the method of use. You don’t have to smoke to get your fix.
2 Likes
5 Likes
i guess part of my question is, how possible is that in the city? i know other cities where that would affectively ban smoking all together.
who are often the biggest smokers. even if cigarette taxes make it expensive, smoking is still pretty cheap self medication for the daily grind of capitalism. at least in the short term anyway.
1 Like
It’s disingenuous to call vaping a smoking cessation tool.
After a year, 1 in 5 people who tried to quit smoking by switching to vapes had quit smoking:
And another study found that vapes were more addictive than tobacco:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6651627/strong text
4 Likes
I used to have the terrible tobacco habit, but I always thought that it was a “no complaint, no crime” matter. I relied heavily on having a bathroom vent pull out the smoke, and it worked well. Never got caught in an apartment I wasn’t suppose to smoke in. Happily gave up that habit almost a decade ago.
2 Likes
Given the wording of the relevant laws it is probably possible to find a decent number of legal places to smoke, but only in single family neighborhoods. If you live in a mixed use or heavily multi-family neighborhood it is highly limited.
1 Like
After a year, 1 in 5 people who tried to quit smoking by switching to vapes were still smoking:
Not to be dense or anything, but isn’t that like an 80% success rate? I personally found a vape extremely helpful in quitting smoking- it allowed me to slowly decrease the nicotine level down to zero, after which I eventually grew bored with it. Even if it doesn’t help people quit, it still seems like a harm reduction slam dunk.
2 Likes
Leases and condo HOA CC&Rs usually have a clause about not allowing noxious smells to escape from the unit. This is how the law should be written. In a building with a properly designed ventilation system, smoking in the bathroom with the fan on creates a negative pressure environment that will not allow the smoke to escape the room. Keep textiles like towels out while smoking and the walls can be washed regularly.
1 Like
Oops, made that backwards. 1 in 5 had quit after a year.
IIRC the evidence is that in (very) well ventilated areas and outside impacts are likely minimal. Barring large crowds with lots of smoke, like say an outdoor concert.
When NYC banned smoking in City Parks they had to back off claims about second hand smoke as a result. And instead justified it on grounds of the damage and litter coming from cigarette butts. Even though that’s already covered by littering ordinances that go unenforced when it comes to cigarettes. Like wise the ban on smoking in parks tends to go unenforced, so it’s all rather pointless.
A lot of times these things are more sideways attempts to ban tobacco use. Since just banning probably wouldn’t fly.
If you really wanted to solve issues with smoking out doors you would start ticketing people for littering when they drop butts on the ground. And rather than banning it entirely in parks, you’d keep it away from particular areas/facilities and crowds. Or restrict it to smoking specific areas away from the same.
Plus you’d apply it equally to anything you might smoke.
Which I’d be so very on board with.
As it is it’s really inconsistent most places, often in ways that neither impacts actual damage nor anyone’s quality of life. A lot of it just ends up being one more broken windows type avenue for harassing non-white neighborhoods.
50 feet from an entrance is more common. Which is good, clusters of people and clusters of smoking and an excessive amount of buts at the entrance to every office building are all a problem.
It’s also just polite. Like I said smoking is gross.
2 Likes
I don’t think I stressed enough the magical thinking that people were expressing. Like they thought that there was no effect at all because it was natural and untouched by a corporation and the evil chemicals that
As for the differences between the two, I don’t think we have enough good studies out there. I’m willing to accept that tobacco is more toxic because nicotine is terrible, but I don’t think there is a clear enough picture of how much more. One of the hard parts is people who smoke marijuana will often use tobacco as well and separating those two can be tricky as seen in:
I haven’t had a chance to read it fully but this was making the rounds and at least the headlines were stating same kind of heart problems you see with tobacco smoke:
Don’t get me wrong, I think it should be legal on a federal level so we can start doing research the right way. There are some canobiods that have health benefits in more way than one. I just am for controls, and doing slow research. The real benefit of medical marijuana isn’t going to be found in a prettied up head shop. It’ll look more like perception drugs with actual dosage information.
1 Like
That is indeed a different story. I wonder if it’s better/worse than cold turkey though. Anecdotally, the folks I know who have tried to quit smoking have rarely met with long-term success.
1 Like
While I’m not unsympathetic to this line of reasoning, I recognize that nuisance laws tend to get used discriminately by LE and prosecutors against marginalized demographics. I think it’s a bad law trying to address a legitimate concern.
3 Likes
The tobacco ban passed 10-1, with the cannabis exemption amendment proposed by gay Supervisor Rafael Mandelman passing 8-3 in favor.
The whole thing came about because some woman called Board President Yee and worked his nerve around the entire "oh, the children… ", because she complained about a heavy TOBACCO smoker in her building. Cannabis smokers have learned to be more appropriate in our use, but reaching into our homes and telling us we cannot smoke cannabis met with a huge outcry from San Franciscans.
You don’t go about starting an entire cannabis industry, have the state of California ban pot smoking in public, and then tell pot smokers they cannot smoke in their own homes.
The proposed pot ban was nothing short of a new Prohibition effort, based in the same old
“reefer ‘madness’” thinking: racist, debunked, and a gross violation of privacy rights.
3 Likes
Tobacco smoking cessation studies consistently show that people who persist in their efforts to quit will eventually quit.
The key is to persist.
1 Like
Appreciations for the context. 
