WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to block a California legislation banning flavored tobacco, clearing the best way for the ban to take impact subsequent week.
As is the court docket’s follow when it guidelines on emergency purposes, its temporary order gave no causes. There have been no famous dissents.
R.J. Reynolds, the maker of Newport menthol cigarettes, had asked the justices to intervene earlier than subsequent Wednesday, when the legislation is ready to go into impact. The firm, joined by a number of smaller ones, argued {that a} federal legislation, the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, permits states to regulate tobacco merchandise however prohibits banning them.
“They can raise the minimum purchase age, restrict sales to particular times and locations, and enforce licensing regimes,” attorneys for Reynolds and several other smaller corporations wrote in an emergency software. “But one thing they cannot do is completely prohibit the sale of those products for failing to meet the state’s or locality’s preferred tobacco product standards.”
State officials responded that the federal legislation was meant to protect the longstanding energy of state and native authorities to regulate tobacco merchandise and to ban their sale. Before and after the enactment of the federal legislation, they wrote, state and native authorities have taken motion in opposition to flavored tobacco and e-cigarettes.
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Whether the federal legislation displaces the state legislation turns on the interpretation of interlocking and overlapping statutory language within the federal legislation. The state officers advised the justices that “courts have universally rejected the tobacco industry’s arguments that state and local laws restricting or prohibiting the sale of flavored tobacco products are expressly pre-empted by that act.”
They added: “Indeed, in the 13 years since Congress enacted” the 2009 legislation, “no court has agreed with the tobacco industry position that the act pre-empts restrictions and prohibitions on the sale of flavored tobacco products.”
Reynolds additionally misplaced on that difficulty in March in a case regarding a Los Angeles County ordinance related to the state legislation. A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that the 2009 law did not displace the ordinance. Reynolds has asked the Supreme Court to hear that case.
A federal choose contemplating the corporate’s separate problem to the state legislation dominated in November that she was sure by that precedent and refused to block the law.
The legislation had been set to go into impact early final yr, however it was suspended whereas voters thought-about a referendum difficult it. The tobacco trade spent tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in help of the measure, however 63 p.c of the state’s voters approved the law in November.
In their Supreme Court temporary, state officers urged the justices not to delay the legislation any longer. “The unsuccessful referendum campaign has already delayed the implementation” of the legislation for practically two years, they wrote, “allowing children and teenagers across the state to be initiated into the deadly habit of tobacco use via flavored tobacco products throughout that period.”
The plaintiffs advised the justices that they face “substantial financial losses” from the legislation, noting that menthol cigarettes make up a few third of the cigarette market.
Allowing a ban on menthol cigarettes, attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote, “could also cause significant negative consequences for communities of color, including African Americans. Because African American smokers in particular disproportionately prefer menthol cigarettes, California’s ban would disproportionately harm them, including by exposing them to negative encounters with law enforcement.”
The argument rankled Valerie Yerger, a University of California, San Francisco, well being coverage researcher and founding member of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council.
“When we look at the need to protect African Americans from the predatory exploitation of the tobacco industry, we need to look at the fact that a menthol ban will protect them,” Ms. Yerger mentioned. “It will not only add years to people’s lives, but it will increase the quality of their life.”
State officers pointed the justices to a letter in April from the N.A.A.C.P. to the Food and Drug Administration lamenting what the group referred to as the “egregious marketing practices of the tobacco industry” and the truth that “African Americans suffer disproportionately from being addicted to cigarettes and the effects of long-term tobacco use.”
Last week, the Justice Department introduced an settlement for 200,000 retailers to show eye-catching indicators of their shops concerning the risks of cigarette smoking. The order goes into impact in July and offers retailers three months to put up the indicators. The settlement settles the phrases of a 1999 racketeering lawsuit filed by the U.S. authorities in opposition to tobacco corporations, together with Reynolds.
Also final week, a federal court docket choose in Texas sided with tobacco corporations, blocking an F.D.A. order to place giant graphic warnings concerning the harms of cigarettes on particular person packages.
Christina Jewett contributed reporting.