The question is being asked by worried retailers all across the convenience store landscape: will flavor regulation target smokeless tobacco?
The answer, unfortunately, appears to be: eventually. While smokeless tobacco is considered mostly safe for now, there are some states that have begun targeting the product.
Smokeless tobacco has largely flown under the radar of flavor bans, but several states and municipalities continue to eye it hungrily. Just last year, Thomas Briant, the executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets, told CStore Decisions, “The number of state legislatures that are considering total flavored tobacco product bans is increasing.”
As of May of this year, no fewer than 14 states — Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Washington — had written new legislation to minimize sales of flavored tobacco and nicotine products. These bills have died or been defeated in Nevada, New Mexico and Washington, per Briant.
Many industry veterans are convinced that flavor regulation will begin to target smokeless and eventually modern oral tobacco.
Executives are already pointing to cities in, for example, Minnesota, targeting moist snuff after having implemented menthol bans. A bill is currently moving through the state to ban menthol and flavors. Unfortunately, states and cities that have banned menthol have shown that they consider the logical next step is to do the same with smokeless. With the category’s growing popularity and movement, many are predicting that it is only a matter of time before lawmakers turn their attention to it, as well.
In California and Massachusetts, which have total flavored tobacco product bans, the smokeless category is already affected.
“I do not believe any product is truly safe,” said David Ozgo, president of the Cigar Association of America Inc. and Pipe Tobacco Council Inc. in Washington, D.C. He used his own category to illustrate the trend.
“PATH (Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health), a nationally representative longitudinal study of tobacco use and health in the United States, Wave 5 data shows that 12- to 17-year-old past-30-day usage rates are similar for both products: 0.7% for any cigar and 0.6% for any smokeless product,” Ozgo noted. “These results mean that young people really do not use cigars nor smokeless tobacco. One would think that low to non-existent youth usage rates would preclude any kind of proposed flavored cigar prohibition. Unfortunately that is not the case, and we have various state proposals for flavored cigar bans, along with the FDA’s national proposal.”
