Ban OKd on Cigarette Billboards

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Monday to ban all outdoor advertising of cigarettes and other tobacco products on billboards within 1,000 feet of residential and other “sensitive” areas.

The measure, introduced by Supervisor Gloria Molina, also bans billboard ads for alcoholic beverages and adult telephone sex services in “sensitive” areas, including those around schools, parks, playgrounds, recreational centers, youth centers and churches.

Because the 88 cities in the county would have to approve such an ordinance individually, the supervisors’ action will make new law only in the unincorporated areas, where about 1 million people reside.

The city of Los Angeles is considering a similar restriction on alcohol and tobacco ads; Compton adopted such a ban in October. The state also will begin enforcing some tobacco ad restrictions on Jan. 1, but they are far less restrictive.

“Evidence shows that advertising of tobacco products, alcoholic beverages and adult telephone messages plays a significant role in stimulating illegal consumption of these products by minors,” said Molina, who spent almost a year trying to get the ordinance on the books.

“I am hoping,” she said, “to reduce the degree to which we make smoking, drinking and advertising sex attractive to minors.”

The ordinance’s constitutionality, however, seems sure to be challenged in court.

A representative of Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser and other beers, declined Monday to say whether the company, America’s largest beer producer, would test the law in court.

But one constitutional law scholar said the ordinance is overly broad and vulnerable to judicial intervention.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a USC law professor, said the U.S. Supreme Court last year did let stand a lower court ruling upholding a Baltimore ordinance banning tobacco and alcohol ads.

A federal appeals court in that case concluded that local government’s efforts to protect the health of juveniles within its jurisdiction outweighed any free speech issues raised by advertisers, Chemerinsky said.

But, he said, the ordinance approved by the supervisors “seems particularly troublesome because it is much broader than protecting kids through schools.”

“The only rationale I see [in restricting ads near churches] is that those going to church might find it offensive, and that can’t be a justification for [infringing] free speech,” Chemerinsky said. “There has to be something more than that.”

Molina directed county lawyers to draft an ordinance specifically designed to survive legal challenges, based on the Baltimore case. But one of her aides conceded that the Baltimore plan did not include churches or licensed child-care centers under its protections.

In fact, Molina won passage of the ordinance by agreeing to exempt billboards on property “adjacent to, and designed to be viewed primarily by” drivers on the freeway. It also gives companies six months to pull their billboard ads from the effective date of the ordinance, which is expected to be about Feb. 1.

The ordinance exempts business-related child-care centers so as not to discourage day care in commercial areas.

Even with those compromises, advertisers opposed the ordinance.

Anheuser-Busch Vice President Dane Starling told the supervisors that the 1,000-foot policy is “unduly” restrictive and that billboard ads only serve to urge legal consumers to switch brands.

“They don’t encourage underage drinking,” Starling said. “Lack of parental guidance and peer pressure causes teenage drinking.”

Others who addressed the board disagreed.

“These ads are often aimed at young people, especially in poor and vulnerable communities of color, trying to get us to smoke and to drink,” said Brizeida Rodriguez of the San Fernando Valley Youth Organization.

Each year, 75,000 minors in the U.S. smoke their first cigarette, or 100 a day in Los Angeles County alone, Rodriguez said. Of those, she said, “75% will become long-term addicted smokers,” based on existing studies and scientific data.

Similar abuses of alcohol by teenagers are encouraged by billboard ads, she said. “From personal experience, I have known of friends that abuse these substances they see on huge billboards appealing [to youths] with sexual innuendoes or by showing happy, carefree, healthy models which we try to emulate.”