published on October 23, 2025 – 2:51 PM
Written by AJ Rassamni
I don’t smoke, and I don’t intend to. But I do believe in fairness, in the right of every law-abiding business to operate without being crushed by excessive government overreach. We live in America, where freedom is not selective. It is not reserved for one type of business while denied to another.
The City of Fresno’s recently passed Smoke Shop Conditional Use Permit (CUP) ordinance is a troubling example of selective governance disguised as public safety. While the stated goal, reducing illegal sales and improving community standards, is understandable, the method is unbalanced, punitive, and unjust.
Law overreaches
In April 2025, the Fresno City Council approved a sweeping ordinance that limits the number of smoke shops citywide to just 49, seven per district. Every shop must now apply for a CUP, even if it has operated legally for years. Those who fail to win the permit lottery must shut down or reinvent themselves within an 18-month window.
Reform, not eradication.
This law doesn’t distinguish between responsible operators and bad actors. It treats every shop as guilty until proven innocent. The result? Dozens of small business owners, who’ve hired local workers, paid taxes, and maintained clean, lawful establishments, now face closure through no fault of their own.
Many smoke shop owners poured their life savings into these businesses. Their income supports their homes, their children’s education, and their family’s future. To tell these business owners that they must close or suddenly “change careers” is cruel and unrealistic. For many, this is not just a business, it’s all they know. It’s how they provide for their families and contribute to the tax base.
When liquor stores were more tightly regulated decades ago, the city made the right decision to grandfather in existing stores. The same principle should apply here. Existing smoke shops that have operated responsibly should be grandfathered in, not forced into a bureaucratic lottery that may erase their livelihood overnight.
CBD hypocrisy
One of the clearest examples of unfairness in the ordinance is the ban on selling CBD cream in vape shops. Think about this: you can legally buy the same CBD cream at Walgreens, a minimart or even a liquor store, but not at a vape shop.
If CBD cream is truly a public health concern, why isn’t it banned everywhere? However, if it’s safe enough to sell in pharmacies and liquor stores, why target vape shops alone? The double standard is impossible to justify logically. This law was shaped not by public health science, but by special-interest influence and competition suppression.
Science doesn’t support severity
If we want to ban every product that can cause harm, then where do we stop?
Motor vehicles: roughly 50,000 deaths per year in the U.S. Should we ban cars?
Alcohol: kills around 180,000 Americans annually through overconsumption and accidents. Shall we shutter liquor stores?
Cigarettes: about 480,000 deaths yearly, including secondhand smoke.
Processed foods: sugary drinks, processed meats, packaged snacks, frozen meals, and fast food are responsible for about 700,000 deaths annually through obesity, hypertension, and heart disease. Should we close fast-food restaurants and bakeries?
And what about vaping? According to the CDC, confirmed deaths from vaping in the United States total fewer than 70. Yet Fresno’s ordinance singles out these shops as if they were a major public-health crisis. The numbers simply don’t support the severity of this action.
Ironically, many cigarette smokers are switching to vaping because it’s healthier and helps them quit smoking altogether, a change that can save tens of thousands of lives each year.
So why would Fresno create laws that punish a product helping reduce smoking-related deaths, especially when those same products are sold safely under federal guidelines elsewhere?
Selective morality
If we applied this same moral logic evenly, we’d have to shut down half of America’s industries. We don’t ban harmful things, we regulate them, educate consumers and reward responsibility.
Instead, this ordinance sends the wrong message: that government can pick winners and losers based not on conduct, but on category. And that’s dangerous for every business owner in Fresno.
Human cost, economic harm
Behind every small business is a family, often immigrants, dreamers and hard-working entrepreneurs who believed Fresno was a city of opportunity. Now, those same families face a bureaucratic lottery that could decide whether they keep or lose their livelihood. These shops employ local residents, rent commercial spaces and contribute to the city’s tax base. Forcing them out means more vacant storefronts, lost tax revenue and increased blight — exactly what the city claims it wants to prevent.
And when legal supply dries up? The black market fills the gap, the exact opposite of what the ordinance aims to achieve.
Real problems, real solutions
Our city faces real challenges: homelessness, crime, empty commercial spaces and economic stagnation in many corridors, including Blackstone Avenue. These are not the result of legal smoke shops — they’re the result of decades of poor urban planning and political neglect.
If the city truly wants to improve neighborhoods, here’s how we can start:
Grandfather in existing smoke shops. Treat them as liquor stores were, with respect for prior investment and compliance history.
Target the bad actors. Focus enforcement on shops proven to sell illegal products or engage in crime.
Apply rules equally. If CBD or flavored products are banned in vape shops, they must be banned across all retailers, not selectively.
Reward compliance, not penalize it. Businesses that meet all safety and zoning requirements should be encouraged, not placed into a death lottery.
Include business owners in policymaking. Those who live and work on Fresno’s streets understand the realities better than bureaucrats in City Hall.
People before politics
It’s time to put people, taxpaying citizens, before political special interests. Fresno’s small business owners are not the enemy. They are the backbone of our local economy, the sponsors of our kids’ teams, the ones who keep our commercial corridors alive. If the city truly values fairness, transparency and economic growth, it must reconsider this ordinance and work with, not against, its small business community.
Regulation is necessary. But it must be balanced, consistent, and humane. The American Dream doesn’t survive when we pick and choose which dreams to allow. It survives when we create fair, transparent systems that let good people thrive, regardless of what they sell, so long as it’s legal.
Let Fresno be known as a city that values justice and opportunity, not one that crushes its own entrepreneurs in the name of politics.
AJ Rassamni, a longtime business owner and community advocate, president of the Blackstone Merchants Association, founder of Success From Within, a nonprofit that teaches students that success begins within and candidate for Fresno City Council D7.