San Francisco Experience: Origins of the law, the opposition, and the outcomes

In August 2008, San Francisco, CA became the first city in the U.S. to adopt a No Tobacco Sales in Pharmacies law.  It drew the ire of the tobacco industry and faced push back. One of the national’s largest drugstore chains, and a large tobacco company each filed restraining order requests in attempts to prevent the implementation of San Francisco’s tobacco-free pharmacy law. Courts denied both requests and allowed the law to go into effect as scheduled in October 2008.  San Francisco’s law initially did not apply to grocery stores and big-box retailers, but the city expanded the law in 2010 to include all stores that contain pharmacies after the California Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the large pharmacy chain in a lawsuit that claimed the law violated equal protection rights by not applying to all stores that contain pharmacies. The 2010 expansion resulted in a large grocery store chain filing a lawsuit, which was dismissed by the U.S. District Court in 2011.