On April 7, 2026, Supervisor Myrna Melgar introduced an ordinance to ban smoking on the outdoor patios of San Francisco bars. Roughly 50 venues are affected, concentrated in the city’s legacy LGBTQ+ nightlife and Mission dive scene.
But who actually asked for this? The Small Business Commission voted against it. The bars have now organized against it. 311 records don’t show residents complaining about smoking on patios, and Bay Area public sentiment is against it.
No one really asked for this, but the supervisor’s office is moving forward anyway. Why? We set out to find who’s behind it, and what’s driving them.
The Small Business Commission is against it
The Small Business Commission, the body specifically charged with evaluating small-business impact, voted 6-0 against the ordinance on April 27, 2026, citing concern that customers might shift to smoking on the sidewalk and that nightlife is still recovering from COVID.
Commissioner Dimitri Cornet argued for personal choice and named affected venues:
“If I know I don’t want to be around that, I won’t go. We have El Rio, we have Toad Hall, Mothership, Midway, Royal Cuckoo, and these are places that actually invested in their smoking areas. So they considered their patrons, they considered their neighbors, and that’s why they invested in these areas to make sure there’s not a nuisance to the neighbors.”
The bars are against it
The bars have also also organized against the ordinance. Thirteen of them (Zeitgeist, El Rio, the Stud, Kilowatt, Thee Parkside, SF Eagle, and others) wrote a petition that has collected over 2,500 signatures as of this writing, including from bars without smoking patios who signed in solidarity.
SF Eagle owner Alejandro Montiel submitted a six-page Small Business Impact Brief to the Small Business Commission for the April 27 meeting. He also called out File 260281, a proposal to legalize indoor cannabis smoking at SF cafes, which was Item #4 directly next to File 260361 on the SBC’s same April 27 agenda:
“Ironically, as item #4 on your agenda, you will be considering BOS File #260281 which could legalize the smoking of marijuana at some cafes… it would seem grossly hypocritical to expand the INDOOR smoking of marijuana at cafes while simultaneously banning the OUTDOOR smoking of tobacco at bars.”
The cannabis ordinance presented one agenda item later lets businesses designate any amount of space for indoor consumption, requiring only that they “mitigate the transmission of smoke.”
Two consecutive agenda items, one against smoking outside and one for smoking inside Source: Small Business Commission Hearing Recording, April 27
The workers aren’t asking either
Proponents of the ordinance say it’s about worker health. The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network and a tobacco-control nonprofit both testified that bartenders deserve protection from secondhand smoke.
But the worker who showed up to speak for workers testified against it. Stephen Torres, a nightlife worker and former entertainment commissioner said:
“When it comes down to enforcement, it’s going to come to us as workers. And we are also the people that are going to be penalized… These fines are exceedingly steep. And then if those build up, there’s risk of closure. There’s risk of us losing our jobs.”
The main worker health argument was answered in 1998, when California banned smoking inside bars. Bartenders mostly work inside, which has been smoke-free for almost three decades. And the cannabis ordinance heard the same day would expose cafe workers to indoor smoke. SF is preparing to expand indoor worker exposure to cannabis smoke and forbid outdoor exposure to tobacco smoke at the same time.
Residents are complaining about smoking drugs on sidewalks, not patios
When it voted against the ordinance, the Small Business Commission asked the city for data on complaints associated with patio smoking. So we pulled SF’s 311 records to see what residents actually file complaints about when they say “smoking.” Roughly 6,240 records mention the word. About 107 of them mention “patio” anywhere in the text, roughly 1.7% of the city’s smoking-related complaint volume. After analyzing ticket descriptions from each major category, the picture is clear. Residents are filing thousands of complaints about street-level public drug-smoking, and almost none about bar patios.
Below is a sample of the thousands of similar complaints:
“4 homeless people at the playground, one smoking fentanyl. DO. YOUR. JOB.”
“Out of the open smoking is crack right in front of everybody.”
“Large group of homeless drug users smoking fentanyl in front of apartment.”
“20+ people. Camping tents completely blocking the sidewalk… smoking crack cocaine and fentanyl.”
The complaints reflect the city’s underlying public health emergency. In 2025, 621 people died of accidental drug overdose in San Francisco. Seventy percent of those deaths involved fentanyl. The dominant route of fentanyl use, per a UCSF study published in May 2024, is now smoking, not injection. The same study finds this shift is increasing overdose risk, as fentanyl residue accumulates on shared smoking equipment and is consumed by users who haven’t built opioid tolerance. By 2025, San Francisco County ranked second in the nation for fatal drug overdoses, per the CDC. About eighty percent happened in just four ZIP codes: 94102 (Tenderloin), 94103 (SoMa), 94109 (Nob Hill/Polk), and 94110 (Mission).
Bars opposing the ordinance, including Zeitgeist and El Rio, sit in those same neighborhoods. SF is preparing to use its legislative bandwidth and enforcement capacity on legal, taxed, age-gated, employee monitored tobacco smoking on private patios, in the same neighborhoods where it has been unable to stop unregulated public smoking of a drug that killed hundreds of San Franciscans last year alone.
So who DOES want this?
Supervisor Melgar represents District 7 on the West side, including the Inner Sunset, West Portal, and St. Francis Wood. None of the bars affected by the ordinance are in her district.
The advocacy pushing this ordinance is, in part, a top-down, state-funded program executing a state contract, and the legislative record presents that work as if it were unsponsored grassroots advocacy.
LGBTQ Minus Tobacco, whose 2022 air quality measurement and 2023–24 patron survey are cited in the legislative record, operates under California Department of Public Health Tobacco Prevention Program contracts #20-10004 and #25-10293. The structure that funds it pays roughly $400,000 per organization per year over a five-year grant term. Its three published policy priorities are youth protection, price regulation, and “promoting smoke-free policies at bar patios and outdoor venues.” The ordinance is, in plain terms, a contract deliverable.
The campaign is a Bay Area brand nested inside several layers of nonprofits and state entities.
The expanding mission of Prop 99
All of this machinery runs on a single revenue source: California’s voter-approved tobacco tax. Smokers pay it on every pack. Most of the revenue goes to Medi-Cal, hospital reimbursements for the uninsured, university research, and stop-smoking services. A smaller share, set aside by Prop 99 in 1988, and reinforced by Prop 56 in 2016, funds tobacco prevention. That share pays for the network above: research grants, patron surveys, policy templates, and local coalitions. It works. California adult smoking has fallen from 22.7% in 1988 to 5.5% in 2023, almost entirely because of organized work like this.
This same success also shrunk the tobacco-tax base that funds the work. The program responded by expanding its scope. In 1988 the program’s stated goal was “a social milieu and legal climate in which tobacco becomes less desirable, less acceptable, and less accessible”. There was no defined endpoint. California voters approved that mandate. Taxing smokers to fund health was uncontroversial.
San Franciscans did not vote on what came next. With adult smoking now down to 5.5%, the program has been renamed (from California Tobacco Control Program to California Tobacco Prevention Program) and rebriefed. Its three stated goals are now to “end the tobacco use epidemic in California,” “make all California communities tobacco free,” and “eliminate the tobacco industry’s influence in California.”
The state-funded California Endgame Initiative targets ending all tobacco sales in California by 2035. There is no smoking rate at which the mandate is finished. The patio smoking ban is an outcome of that administratively-expanded mandate, not something SF voters ever approved. This is how a program funded by tobacco taxes ends up writing $400,000-a-year contracts to pursue policy wins against a steadily shrinking minority.
Let Adults Choose
The cannabis cafe ordinance heard at the same commission hearing has a simple premise: adult patrons choose, the business chooses what it allows, and customers who don’t want it go elsewhere. Bar patios have worked like this for decades. No one has explained why that premise is acceptable for cannabis cafes and unacceptable for bar patios. No one has explained why we are devoting resources to smoking on patios when residents are complaining about smoking fentanyl on the surrounding streets.
I don’t smoke anymore. There was a time over a decade ago when I’d have one between drinks at a place like Bacchus Kirk (RIP) or out in front of Tunnel Top. I enjoyed meeting random people and shooting the shit. California’s policies and the gradual cultural shift made smoking less worth it for me and my friends. It worked. I have no interest in starting again, but I’m also not going to tell someone else what they should do outside at a private business I chose to walk into. The state already got most of what it set out to get. There isn’t much upside in getting to zero from here.
California is trying to protect adults from outdoor cigarette smoke, and might suffocate its own small businesses in the process.