David Margolius is looking at some flavored vapes at a Shell gas station on Cleveland’s East Side. There’s strawberry banana, vanilla and raspberry watermelon, among others. The man behind the counter gives him a puzzled look, wondering if Margolius will buy anything.
“We’re just admiring your flavored vape collection,” Margolius says. This is not an entirely honest answer from Cleveland’s Director of Public Health. He’s not so much admiring as tsk-tsking in his head on repeat.
“Frozen banana? Look at that,” he says, pointing to a vape with Mike Tyson’s face on the box.
Not only is Margolius not interested in buying any of these vapes, he doesn’t want anyone else to buy them either. He has been campaigning Cleveland City Council to ban the sale of flavored vapes and menthol cigarettes in Cleveland for more than a year.
“The flavors are more addictive. They’re more targeted towards children,” he says. “In the case of menthol, they’re more targeted towards Black people with 10 times as many advertisements in Black neighborhoods compared to white neighborhoods.”
He largely blames flavored tobacco for the city’s disproportionately high smoking rates; 35% in Cleveland compared to 11.5% nationwide.
Smoking still causes 480,000 deaths a year and remains the “leading cause of preventable death in the United States,” according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Just as the city ponders limiting the sales of flavored tobacco products, the state is gearing up for a new frontier in smoking: legal marijuana.
Voters passed the measure to legalize last November, but state lawmakers are the ones who are supposed to come up with the rules and regulations on who can sell how much weed, in what sorts of flavors, when and where. But the House and the Senate have yet to come to an agreement on those rules. Meanwhile, dispensaries are hoping to start selling weed in June.
Wendy Hyde, regional director of the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation, has spent much of her career advocating for limits on tobacco sales. I ask her if she feels that just as city officials are attempting to shut the lid on one Pandora’s box, the smoke is already starting to seep out of the next one.
“Absolutely,” she says. “We need to rectify what’s going on first with tobacco and pass effective laws locally that are enforceable so that we can mitigate nicotine addiction prior to having to start dealing with marijuana and the next steps in that area.”
She hopes state legislators will be considerate in how they regulate marijuana sales, and not forget about some effective enforcement mechanisms while they’re at it, because she’s not eager to take on another issue.
“We have our hands full with nicotine addiction,” she says.
Margolius seems a little less worried about the whole smoky Pandora’s box situation, though he tells me that he’s learned to never not worry about things.
“The criminalization of marijuana was a failed policy that disproportionally hurt Black people, Black communities, and so making it illegal to possess marijuana did not help anybody,” he says. “What we want from cigarettes is the same thing we’re hoping will happen with marijuana in that you can’t sell flavored products, there shouldn’t be marijuana dispensaries all over the place, especially near schools or where kids go, and there should be some degree of oversight from health inspectors in the process of dispensing marijuana.”
At the gas station Margolius points to some vapes and imagines what adding marijuana to those flavor combinations would look like.
“This would be bad,” he says. “That’s what we’re trying to stop, for sure.”
Smoking cannabis comes with its risks. Studies show that it increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.
Still, it’s the thought of nicotine that keeps Margolius up at night.
“Nicotine is just so much more addictive than marijuana, so it really is a bigger threat,” he says.
The fact is that regulating marijuana is a task that’s been assigned to the state legislature, but limiting the sales of flavored tobacco products in Cleveland is something he can maybe do something about.
He’s come up against some resistance. State legislators tried to prevent local municipalities from enacting bans, though a judge recently blocked that law. And while some City Council members worry about enforcement mechanisms, others say more should be done to educate people that smoking kills. There’s also concern for small businesses that could be hurt and worries that a black market for flavored products could pop up.
Margolius says he hears all of these concerns and frankly dismisses most of them in light of what could be gained.
“We’ve heard it before, and at the end of the day, you still have to do what’s right to help people,” he says.
For more updates about Cleveland, sign up for our Cleveland Magazine Daily newsletter, delivered to your inbox six times a week.
Cleveland Magazine is also available in print, publishing 12 times a year with immersive features, helpful guides and beautiful photography and design.
