Kansas City flavored tobacco ban has good intentions, but would produce bad results | Opinion

History shows that banning flavored tobacco and nicotine products has little positive impact, and instead results in a long list of negative consequences. Unfortunately, despite this knowable outcome, the Kansas City Council is once again taking steps to implement such a ban. This is a mistake, from both an economic and a public health perspective.

Banning legal and accessible products in high demand does not eliminate the appeal in the marketplace. Instead, it creates a vacuum where consumers are forced to spend their money in other markets, often across state lines. This is particularly relevant for Kansas City, given its location. Missouri customers looking to buy flavored vaping products or nicotine pouches can simply head over to Kansas, where such onerous prohibitions are not in place.

Kansas City’s retailers and small businesses would feel the impact of the City Council’s ill-advised attempt to dictate what its residents can and cannot buy when these consumers are driven to other markets. Convenience stores would lose business, not just from lost sales of flavored tobacco and nicotine products directly, but from other products such as gasoline, food and beverages these shoppers buy when visiting convenience stores. After all, if a store doesn’t sell your preferred product, why go there at all?

On top of these impacts on small businesses, the city’s government would be handing over significant tax revenue tied to flavored tobacco and nicotine sales to neighboring communities. The city’s finance department estimates that this ordinance would decrease local tax revenues from $1-$6 million annually. How would this be accounted for in our budget? Would other taxes be raised or services cut to make up for the shortfall?

These impacts aren’t hypothetical. One need only look to other municipalities and states where governments have injudiciously implemented flavor bans — such as Massachusetts and the city of Golden, Colorado — to recognize the economic harms caused by such misguided policies immediately.

In Massachusetts, a similar flavor ban enacted in 2019 has negatively impacted the state’s economy. In the year immediately following implementation, 90% of lost tobacco and nicotine sales simply moved across borders to states, such as New Hampshire, which alone saw a 22% increase of cigarette sales. The downstream impacts on the state’s tax revenues were just as harmful, with Massachusetts losing nearly $150 million in tax revenue.

In Golden, Colorado, the City Council was forced to take action this year to remedy the harms caused by a ban on all flavored tobacco and nicotine products in the city, creating a $100,000 relief fund for small businesses that have lost sales as a result.

The drawbacks to this policy extend beyond mere dollars and cents. While the council’s goal is to improve public health, the Massachusetts and Golden case studies show that flavor bans do not lead to a decrease in tobacco and nicotine usage, and may actually do more harm than good. As the data outlined above indicates, Kansas City residents who are seeking to quit smoking may just revert back to cigarettes — the most dangerous form of tobacco and nicotine consumption — instead of using flavored smoke-free alternatives, such as vapes and nicotine pouches. Rather than improving public health, the opposite could happen.

The City Council’s intentions may be laudable, and the Missouri Grocers Association shares its desire to see a healthier Kansas City. But implementing a flavor ban brushes aside negative economic and public health impacts.

This is all avoidable. Lawmakers in Massachusetts and Golden didn’t have the benefit of hindsight when they implemented bans, but City Council members in Kansas City do. It would be ill advised now to replicate a policy that leads to predictably negative outcomes.