The San Diego Patio Proposal Is Small — the Precedent It Sets Is Not

San Diego is the latest California city to test how far outdoor smoking restrictions can reach. A proposal now before the San Diego City Council would ban outdoor smoking and vaping within 25 feet of diners, creating broader rules for restaurant patios in a city where businesses have been able to set their own policies. For a county where many municipalities already restrict outdoor smoking, the significance is less about San Diego alone and more about what a citywide standard in California’s second-largest city signals to every jurisdiction watching.

The proposal fills what its backers frame as a gap. While many cities across San Diego County already have widespread bans on outdoor smoking, San Diego does not, and the proposal would establish a citywide standard for smoking and vaping near diners. Councilmember Jennifer Campbell’s office reports strong public support: 78 percent of surveyed city residents support the ban, along with 88 percent of restaurant professionals (San Diego City Council considers smoking ban near restaurant patios, NBC 7 San Diego, September 23, 2026). The measure is not absolute — it would exempt adult-only bars and nightclubs, as well as private areas closed to the public.

Weeks earlier, the Marin County town of Corte Madera adopted Ordinance No. 1060, ending the legal sale of tobacco and nicotine products within town limits entirely. Corte Madera did not arrive there overnight. As CRA documented, the ordinance was the culmination of a deliberate, incremental march: the town had already adopted a tobacco retailer license requirement, prohibited flavored tobacco sales, and barred pharmacies from tobacco retailing before it moved to a full commercial sales prohibition. Each step normalized the next, and Corte Madera itself was following jurisdictions like Beverly Hills, Manhattan Beach, Tiburon, and Ross, while Mill Valley has already directed staff to draft its own phase-out.

That is the pattern worth naming. Outdoor patio restrictions and full sales bans are different tools, but they belong to the same escalation logic: a restriction adopted in one city becomes the template — and the political cover — for the next. A 25-foot buffer becomes a full patio ban, a full patio ban becomes a citywide outdoor ban, and outdoor bans grease the path toward the retail prohibitions that Corte Madera now embodies. As CRA has warned, the precedent set in a small town becomes the county model next year and the state framework after that. San Diego, unlike Corte Madera, is a market of more than a million people. A standard adopted here does not stay here.

CRA’s concern is specific and grounded in the federal record. Premium handmade cigars are not the product driving the harms these measures invoke. The FDA-commissioned 2022 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report found that premium cigar consumers are overwhelmingly older adults who use the product infrequently, and the FDA’s own PATH study data shows youth use of premium cigars to be statistically negligible. The federal courts have recognized this distinction directly: CRA was a lead plaintiff in the litigation before U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta that vacated the FDA’s regulatory authority over premium cigars, a ruling since affirmed on appeal.

The lesson from both cities is the same one CRA raised in Corte Madera: prohibition-style policy does not eliminate adult demand for a legal product — it relocates it. At national scale, that means black markets; at municipal scale, it means a short drive across the town line and the loss of licensed, age-verified oversight (Corte Madera Ends Legal Tobacco Sales, CRA, 2026). Careless definitions written at the local level, sweeping premium cigars in with vaping devices and nicotine pouches, get replicated wholesale.

This is why CRA engages at the council level, on proposals large and small. We urge San Diego, and every jurisdiction weighing similar measures, to distinguish clearly between the mass-market products that animate public concern and the handmade premium cigars that the science and the federal courts have already set apart — and to draw that line using the Mehta Definition, a durable, loophole-proof standard the city can adopt once and rely on. The patio proposal may look modest. The precedent is not.