Officials in more than a half-dozen Greater Boston communities have either passed bans or begun considering them just weeks after the Supreme Judicial Court upheld a groundbreaking bylaw that banned the sale of tobacco and e-cigarettes to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2000, reported The Boston Globe.
Brookline, Massachusetts, a town of about 60,000 outside of Boston, adopted a bylaw in 2020 that bans the sale of tobacco to anyone born in the 21st century. The bylaw was the first of its kind in the country and was upheld by the state's highest court in March, NACS Daily reported.
“Once unprecedented, a rule banning the sale of tobacco and e-cigarettes to most, if not all, people born this century has quickly proliferated in Massachusetts, turning the state into ground zero for a novel effort to go beyond setting a minimum age to combat tobacco use,” The Globe said.
Susan Albright, a city councilor in Newton, Massachusetts, who has helped draft ban proposals, advocated that all municipalities need to band together, or consumers can easily travel outside borders to buy cigarettes, saying, “We need to make it a mass movement.”
Several towns or cities were weighing their own proposals before the SJC issued its ruling on March 8, the Globe said.
Three boards of health in the Boston area (Wakefield, Stoneham and Melrose) have already approved their own versions of the ban and two more (Winchester and Malden) are holding public hearings in the coming days on their proposals. Health officials said two more communities (Reading and Medford) could follow next month.
“They’ve (supporters of the ban) certainly run with their success,” Peter Brennan, executive director of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association, told the Globe. “It’s almost like they took the SJC ruling that towns could do this as saying that they should do this.”
Retailers say that moving so quickly creates a “slippery slope” for towns to target other products local officials consider a public health issue. Brennan told the Globe it’s weighing whether to appeal the SJC ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it has yet to make a decision.
“The fact that [these local regulations] are spreading so quickly,” Brennan said, “certainly bolsters our argument that there could be a federal issue here.”
Earlier this month, the United Kingdom approved a bill that will ban tobacco sales for anyone born after January 1, 2009 or later, along with other countries who have implemented strict bans in recent years.
According to a report by the Massachusetts Illicit Tobacco Task Force (ITTF), bootleg cigarette smuggling is an ongoing drain on law enforcement as illicit tobacco seizures surge and state tax revenue from tobacco sales continues to plummet, NACS Daily reported.