Public Comment

Smoking in Dispensaries:Letter to the Berkeley City Council

Carol Denney
Saturday February 15, 2020 - 02:56:00 PM

Dar Berkeley City Council,

I appreciate the revisions made to the dispensary regulations at the last City Council meeting, which recognize that flavored products are playing a large role in the underage smoking epidemic in California, an epidemic even higher in the City of Berkeley's current underage population and disproportionately targeted toward communities of color.

But the current regulations still allow involuntary exposure to employees and customers by allowing on-site consumption, something the tobacco, marijuana, and vaping industries have been trying to re-introduce into workplaces for decades. Only about half of the states in the nation have smokefree worker protections, and their disease rates show it. Many dispensary customers wish to have safe access to products such as creams, oils, patches, lozenges, etc., but do not use any combustible forms of cannabis and will risk exposure to secondhand smoke and emissions if they enter a dispensary with on-site consumption, since there is no effective ventilation or air filtration system which can remove small particulates (see ASHRAE Position Document below). This industry warning was updated only six months ago to ensure that no legislation suggests that ventilation is an effective safety measure, as Berkeley's impending regulations from the Cannabis Commission currently, erroneously, do.

All Berkeley renters who use combustible medical marijuana can legally smoke in their units, and have no need of on-site smoking as many of the City Council erroneously stated: 

12.70.035 "...E. Use of medical cannabis, including through the use of an electronic smoking device, within the enclosed area of a unit by a person for whom using medical cannabis is not a crime under California law shall be exempt from this Section."

Science should matter to the Berkeley City Council; science-based policy is why we were formerly a leader in health policy on secondhand smoke. Without revisions, the current regulations will require re-writing our secondhand smoke protections to eliminate protections for vulnerable groups. Further, they mislead the public regarding the efficacy of ventilation, which should have been part of the discussion all along. The ventilation industry's voice should be the overriding authority on ventilation. Their entire position document is linked below (see below), which clearly states that the only effective way to eliminate health risks associated with indoor exposure is "to ban smoking activity."

Please pull the current regulations from the upcoming consent calendar and recommend their return to the commissions tasked with making sure public health and labor issues are not left out, as they have been so far. I would respectfully recommend adding the Commission on Disability, the Commission on Labor, and the Youth Commission to the groups offered input on this serious issue. 




The ASHRAE Position Document on Secondhand Smoke

ASHRAE concludes that:
• It is the consensus of the medical community and its cognizant authorities that ETS is a health risk, causing lung cancer and heart disease in adults, and exacerbation of asthma, lower respiratory illnesses and other adverse effects on the respiratory health of children.
• At present, the only means of effectively eliminating health risk associated with indoor exposure is to ban smoking activity.
• Although complete separation and isolation of smoking rooms can control ETS exposure in non-smoking spaces in the same building, adverse health effects for the occupants of the smoking room cannot be controlled by ventilation.
©The ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) Position Document on Secondhand Smoke

https://www.ashrae.org/.../ASHRAE_PD_Environmental_Tobacco_Smoke_2016.pdf

cc: Commission on Labor, Commission on Disability, Community Health Commission, Youth Commission