SF Board of Supervisors passes tobacco smokefree multiunit housing bill but exempts marijuana

Tonight the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to make multiunit housing tobacco smokefree but turned a blind eye to the evidence on the similar harms of secondhand marijuana smoke. The Board will have to vote a second time next week to send the ordinance to the mayor for signature.

Marijuana advocates successfully argued that it was “classist” to prohibit smoking marijuana in apartments when people who owned single family homes could smoke it at home. They didn’t seem to think it important that poor people have higher exposures to secondhand (tobacco) smoke than rich people, so enjoy fewer protections. I haven’t seen any direct studies on secondhand marijuana smoke exposure as a health disparity, but expect that the findings would be similar.

Here are the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle stories on the meeting.

Here is the legislation as past and the legislative digest summarizing the legislation.