Berkeley, CA Business Licensing & Operations: Tobacco Retail License (2026)

030 requires every tobacco retailer, defined to include stores selling electronic nicotine delivery systems and e-liquids, to hold a valid City tobacco retailer's license for each location. 035 then narrows who can qualify: no new license may issue to a pharmacy and no existing pharmacy license may be renewed, closing off drugstores as tobacco or vape outlets. Subsection C blocks any new license authorizing tobacco sales within six hundred feet of any school, measured in a straight line between the nearest property lines of the school parcel and the business parcel, and the City Council adopts a map by resolution showing which parcels fall inside that buffer.

Subsection D goes further for vaping products specifically: as of January 1, 2017, no person may sell, give away, barter or otherwise deal in electronic nicotine delivery systems or e-liquid within that same six-hundred-foot school buffer at all, regardless of licensing, with a narrow carve-out for sales to medical cannabis patients or caregivers holding a Health and Safety Code card, provided the device is not bundled with any other tobacco product. 020(P) reaches BUSD buildings and other K-12 institutions with 25 or more students, but excludes small private programs and home-based study. 090(B), and repeated license violations escalate from a 30-day suspension on a first offense within five years up to outright revocation on a fourth.