Law: C-store, grocery and drug tobacco ban
Status: Dead after Assembly Business and Professions Committee declined to vote in June 2016
Why You Should Care: Many local governments have implemented channel-specific bans on tobacco’s subsegments, including flavors. While losing flavors alone has a negative effect, California’s convenience retailers successfully lobbied that losing all tobacco sales—which NACS data suggests accounts for 37.4% of in-store sales—would have been disastrous.
Law: Dueling cigarette tax-increase proposals
Status: Potentially on the November ballot
Why You Should Care: Not one but two tax increases are being supported by manufacturers. One proposal, backed by value-driven cigarette companies such as Cheyenne International LLC and Xcaliber International Ltd., would immediately take Missouri’s 17-cents-per-pack tax to 23 cents per pack. The other proposal, supported by Reynolds American Inc., would raise the excise tax to 60 cents over time.
Law: E-liquid certification law
Status: Indiana’s Alcohol Tobacco Commission delayed implementation by 60 days to review law.
Why You Should Care: Indiana’s law requires e-liquid manufacturers get certified by a state-approved security firm. The problem is, only one security firm in the country has been deemed qualified to do so under the law’s strict requirements, potentially giving that security firm—and the six relatively new e-liquid companies it has partnered with—a monopoly.
Law: A “tobacco-free generation”
Status: Dead after City Council declined to vote in April 2016
Why You Should Care: Brookline proposed a different twist on banning tobacco, seeking to outlaw tobacco sales to anyone born after 1995. Though this measure failed to go to vote, it seems likely that other local governments could also seek out different ways to ban tobacco sales, as Westminster, Mass., famously attempted in 2014.
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