On September 30 California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB1775, “Cannabis: retail preparation, sale, and consumption of noncannabis food and beverage products,” that opens to door to rolling back smokefree hospitality venues in California. Specifically, it allows on-site cannabis consumption lounges, where authorized by local governments, to become restaurants serving food or clubs serving food (but not alcohol).
Health advocates, including Americans for Nonsmokers Right, the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, and American Lung Association have been fighting this bill for the last four years. It passed the Legislature last year, but Gov. Newsom vetoed it at the urging of the health groups. This is a bill we had been working hard to fight in 4 successive legislative years together with AHA, ACS, and ALA. Last year he had vetoed it. This Newsom caved to the cannabis industry putting their profits over creating a massive crack in California’s progress on smoke-free air, including smoke-free restaurants and bars, and ignoring all the science.
As the Sacramento Bee reported,
Newsom in 2023 vetoed a similar bill, citing concerns with the health and safety of cafe workers and the importance of maintaining a smoke-free workplace. “I commend the author (Assemblyman Matt Haney, D-San Francisco) for incorporating additional safeguards, such as expressly protecting employees’ discretion to wear a mask for respiration, paid for at the expense of the employer, and requiring employees to receive additional guidance on the risks of secondhand cannabis smoke,” Newsom wrote in his signing statement.
The problem with this argument, is that wearing a mask — something that is unlikely to happen in the real world — does not fully protect people from secondhand marijuana smoke. And, how does giving employees “guidance on the risks of secondhand cannabis smoke” protect them from its harmful effects? Essentially with Assemblyman Haney and Governor Newsom are saying is that if workers want to be protected they should get another job.
This has always been the tobacco industy’s argument against smokefree workplaces. It’s disappointing (and a bad precedent) to see California leaders, who have long rejected this argument, embracing it.
The Sacramento Bee went on to report
[Newsom’s] signing was condemned by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, whose managing director, Jim Knox, who in a statement expressed deep disappointment with the decision. “AB 1775 violates Proposition 64 (the 2016 California ballot measure that legalized recreational marijuana in the state), which explicitly states that smoking marijuana is prohibited wherever smoking tobacco is prohibited,” Knox said. “It also undermines the state’s smoke-free restaurants law and compromises its enforcement, thus threatening to roll back decades of hard-won protections of everyone’s right to breathe clean, smoke-free air.” [emphasis added]
Hopefully, the heath groups will sue and block implementation of AB1775.
Meanwhile, Assemblyman Haney sounds like the tobacco industry: “lots of people want to enjoy legal cannabis in the company of others.” “And many people want to do that while sipping coffee, eating a scone, or listening to music. There’s absolutely no good reason from an economic, health or safety standpoint that the state should make that illegal. If an authorized cannabis retail store wants to also sell a cup of coffee and a sandwich, we should allow cities to make that possible and stop holding back these small businesses.”
Let’s hope that the tobacco companies (which have considered getting into the marijuana business since the 1970s and are in it in other countries), don’t use this thinking to further undermine smokefree environments. Most other states that allow cannabis use indoors in public also allow nicotine smoking.
The good news, such as it is
The good news is that AB1775 does not immediately allow cannabis use in hospitality venues. What it does do is allows local governments to permit cannabis in hospitality businesses. So, we can now expect lots of local fights over the issue.
Local jurisdictions are always where the clean indoor air movement has been strongest. Hopefully, we will be able to stop any additional weakening of clean indoor air protections by working at the local level while health advocates fight to have the courts block AB1775.
Stanton Glantz blog 