Can Dave Margolius End the Sale of Flavored Tobacco in Cleveland?

Dave Margolius, Cleveland’s head of the Department of Public Health, has made a fight against tobacco one of his main priorities. Credit: Mark Oprea

If there’s a number that tends to keep Dave Margolius up at night, it might be 35.

Thirty-five percent of Clevelanders smoke tobacco products, which is one of the highest rates in the country, by a large margin. (The national average is 11 percent.)

Ever since Margolius became the director of Cleveland’s Department of Public Health since last August, he’s made Big Tobacco target number one on his slate of public concerns.

“When I think about the work of public health, I think about the huge disparities in life expectancy and quality of life for residents of Cleveland, compared to our inner ring suburbs,” Margolius said from behind his desk overlooking East 12th. Before him sat a folder labeled “Tobacco,” one containing marketing budgets and retailer excel sheets. “And so the number one leading contributor of all of that is smoking. It’s simply the leading preventable cause of death.”

At the focal point of Margolius’ advocacy is the creation of the Coalition to End Tobacco Targeting, a massive collection of nonprofits, hospitals, political bodies and community development corporations that are rallying around one main goal: to end the marketing and sale of flavored tobacco products in Cleveland. That is, by convincing City Council to pass the appropriate legislation.

About three years after Cleveland began the first Ohio city to enact Tobacco 21 legislation—raising the legal age three years—there’s been an increasing weight placed on City Hall to outlaw smoking products that, as the Coalition’s ad campaign makes clear, are very much an issue in the Black community.

“These big companies want to target people that look like me, and shorten their lives,” a man named Sam, who is Black, says in one of the ads. “And life is so precious. It’s so precious. And to spend money, essentially to end someone’s life? It’s crazy to me.”

The Coalition’s marketing efforts have followed a sort of behind-the-scenes effort to nudge Council, which is currently hesitant about the idea of a ban, into believing the positive effects of outlawing flavored tobacco outweigh the perceived negative ones.

That is to say, in Council’s mind, taking away tobacco products would carve a financial hole in the 618 retailers, the gas stations and corner stores, that rely on sales of Newports and Elfbar vapes. It’s what seemed to be the primary concern of council members in February when legislation in favor of the ban was discussed. The result, Margolius expected: Hundreds of tobacco lobbyists, retailers and storeowners called or e-mailed Council warning of the potentially grave loss.

“This is something that takes a little bit more discussion,” Council President Blaine Griffin told Scene last month. “Council is trying to understand the overall process and what’s going on. So that’s what we’re doing at this time.”

Griffin added, “Several council members have had several conversations, but nothing concrete yet, so I can’t say anything concrete has happened yet.”

Bishop Tony Minor, an advocate for the Coalition, integrates anti-tobacco speak into his Sunday sermons at the Community of Faith Assembly in the North Broadway neighborhood. Credit: Mark Oprea

Those participating in the effort see an obvious issue with a clear remedy.

When Margolius joined dozens of members of the coalition and sympathizers to the cause at a gathering in a banquet room at the Hilton Downtown recently, attendees learned about Big Tobacco’s legacy in Black America. There was the 1952 introduction of the menthol tip, the KOOL Jazz Fests in the ’90s, and now the response: the “Black Lives, Black Lungs” campaign of today’s pushback.

Former Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman talked extensively at the event about both his own struggle quitting smoking—”With every puff, I was dying,” he recalled—and his mayoral duty, he said, to outlaw flavored tobacco in his own city. Coleman helped orchestrate a massive data operation that concluded vape sellers were clustered, by chance or by intention, around schools in Black neighborhoods. The data was obvious for Coleman. In late 2022, Columbus City Council passed legislation banning flavored products. They will be illegal there come January.

Bishop Tony Minor, a member of the coalition and a pastor at Community of Faith Assembly in North Broadway, linked the Cleveland lobbying effort against Big Tobacco to the race riots of the 1950s, to the defiance of Rosa Parks and the March on Selma. After all, as Minor told the mostly Black audience, this is a Black issue that demands a Black turnout. (Ninety percent of Black smokers smoke menthols.)

“This is all about movement,” Minor told the room. “And we have to make a commitment for the long haul.” He turned to Margolius, who was waiting by the room’s entrance. “And just as Dr. Margolius said, the first thing we must do is to let the powers that be know that we are not going away.”

The same kind of protest energy is evident in Minor’s Sunday sermons in North Broadway, where he’s been a pastor for the past two decades.

At a recent service, Minor, who often inserts political asides along lessons from the New Testament, brought up his thoughts on tobacco targeting, often leaning into emotional highs about its lethality in the Black community.

“This is disproportionately falling on people of color—people who look like you and I,” Minor said from the pulpit. “There is a clear deleterious effect on all of us.”

“Come on now,” one woman said from the pews. “Alright, alright.”

“They say, ‘Why Cleveland?’ And I say why not Cleveland?” he said, referring to City Council. “Cleveland has the highest smoking rate in country. We have high asthma rates. We have high rates of COPD. We are one of the poorest cities in the nation!” His voice rose in a crescendo. “WHY NOT CLEVELAND, I SAY. AND WHY NOT NOW?”

In the middle of October, two months before Columbus’ ban goes into effect, Scene talked to five owners of corner store markets and gas stations about their thoughts on a similar ban in Cleveland. Many had just placed anti-tobacco signs, a federal order imposed on suppliers R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris, on their doors or over their registers, some next to flyers opposing the “flavor ban.”

The overall sentiment from these stores was more accepting than not: We will adjust to the market if we can no longer sell flavored tobacco.

“I think the whole thing is stupid,” one owner of a gas station on East 55th, who preferred to be anonymous, told Scene. “They need to focus on the vape. In five, ten years, no one under 40 years old is gonna be smoking cigarettes anyway.”

Brendan Dixon, who manages the Dixon’s Market in Hough with his brother, looked more to the immediate effects on retailers like him.

Dixon’s Market, in Hough, would, its owners say, be impacted by the flavor ban. Credit: Mark Oprea

“It would absolutely harm my business. And that’s been a big concern of mine for some time,” Dixon said. Above him, over the register, was one of the anti-tobacco signs pasted in the middle of faded Camel advertisement and a Winston Select sign. “The business side, I know what that would do for me personally.”

Surviving both the Hough Riots and COVID-19, the Dixon family’s market would make do with the estimated two to five percent drop in revenue, just like they’ve battled during recessions. As for his customers, Dixon thinks there will be an illicit market for menthol cigarettes that would pop up around the blocks where legal tobacco was once sold.

“From my understanding, people are not going to stop smoking,” he said, tending to kids buying popsicles. “They’ll find a way to get it. I mean, how did Al Capone get so rich?”

Back at the Department of Public Health, Margolius maintains both the humor and technical creed of an optimist. Watching Margolius chat with the epidemiologists and researchers working under him, one can see a belief system in play, that smoking really is tied to the work most of his staff commits to.

“They’re here because they want to be here,” he said. “They’re not here for the glory, or for the money. They’re here because they believe in making a difference.”

At one point in the interview, Margolius, who has a politician’s timbre, pivoted to the personal. In 2005, when he was a senior in college, he got word that his grandmother, Phyllis, had died from the lung cancer she’d battled for two decades.

“One time we were walking, and we passed someone who was smoking,” he said. “I’m expecting her to say, ‘Oh, I want to grab it, stomp on it,’ but she goes, ‘Every time I walk past someone smoking, I want to grab it and take a drag.'” Margolius paused. “Yeah. It’s like, wow, Grammy. It’s just so hard to quit, just so addictive, and it’s ruined so many lives.”

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