By Lenny Strauss
Hometown Weekly Reporter
The Dover Board of Health held a remote meeting to discuss the proposed tobacco/nicotine ordinance to individuals born after a certain date via Zoom on March 3, 2025, at 6:30PM. Members of the committee discussed the proposed ordinance and its application, setting the stage for a heated dialogue around tobacco use in Massachusetts. In 2020, the town of Brookline adopted a bylaw that banned the sale of tobacco and nicotine products to anyone born after January 1, 2000. It represented the efforts of the town to attempt to phase out the sale of tobacco products.
The bylaw was the first of its kind in the country, with Massachusetts remaining at the forefront of tobacco regulation. It was the first state to “ban all flavors in tobacco products, with Brookline also being the first town in Massachusetts to ban smoking in bars and restaurants, and among the first to ban all flavors in tobacco products, including menthol.” In 2024, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the law, setting the stage for other towns with similar goals to follow suit. Many who support this law and those being proposed in other towns argue that laws such as this one are key to fighting the ill effects of tobacco use.
Katharine Silbaugh, a Boston University law professor, said the generational bans may be effective in curbing smoking at an early age. “It’s the largest preventable cause of death in the United States, and so I’m interested [these bans] for that reason, because there’s so much good that can be done in helping the next generation to avoid its harms,” Silbaugh said. Councilor at Large Alison Leary, who was part of the 2018 effort to raise the minimum age to purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21, called tobacco “one of the few things that, when used as directed, will kill you.” Leary listed the “costs” of tobacco use: “The amount of people it kills, the number of loved ones people lose, the amount of health insurance costs that go to this, loss of productivity, it goes on and on and on.”
On January 23rd, the Newton City Council voted 19-4 to approve their own “generational ban” on tobacco products, prohibiting the sale of these products to anyone born after March 1, 2004. The ban is effectively a lifetime prohibition of these products for anyone born after that date. Newton joins a growing collection of Massachusetts towns proposing bans that include Stoneham, Wakefield, Winchester, Reading, Malden, Melrose, Concord, Chelsea, Belchertown, Needham, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, with the town of Dover now considering one as well.
While these laws have slowly been proposed and enacted in surrounding towns, they do not come without stark opposition. In their own coverage of the issue, the Associated Press found that critics of the Brookline law, including convenience store owners, argued that the Brookline law “conflicts with a 2018 state law that allows those over the age of 21 to purchase tobacco products and would establish two sets of adults, one that can buy cigarettes and one that can’t.” Laws such as this “’create another class of citizens based on the time they were born’ said Peabody City Councilor at Large Anne Manning-Martin. ‘[They] won’t have the same opportunities to make individual decisions about their health. Even as unhealthy a decision this may be, it’s really [their] right for them to make decisions.’” Peter Brennan, executive director of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association, states that proposals such as these directly affect shops which rely on cigarette and tobacco sales as a significant portion of their income. It also would put stores located near neighboring states that allow the sale of cigarettes to all adults at a competitive disadvantage.
“It’s a terrible idea,” he said. “You’re really just taking away adults’ right to purchase a legal, age-restricted product. Taking certain rights away from some adults and not others is likely unconstitutional, adding that other prohibition efforts haven’t worked, like past bans on alcohol, marijuana and gambling.”
Citizens for Adult Choice, an organization committed to protecting individual liberties, especially against laws such as this one argue that the implementation of these ordinances put a citizens’ right to make their own decisions at risk. “Creeping authoritarianism of local authorities who seek to dictate their personal preferences onto other adults through new laws and regulations restrict [our] ability to purchase and consume legal products.” They argue that adults over the age of 21 are “perfectly capable of making these decisions for themselves, and that supplanting these rights creates a slippery slope toward never ending intrusion into more and more private adult decisions.”
The state legislature hasn’t indicated that it intends to introduce similar generational tobacco ban legislation, and neither has the Boston City Council. However, it’s hard to say what direction the city will head in if bans continue to proliferate the surrounding towns. While Massachusetts state law does not have any form of a generational tobacco ban in place, the state allows local jurisdictions to implement their own forms of tobacco control, which was further supported by the 2024 ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court, which they reiterated in their ruling: “State laws and local ordinances and bylaws can, and often do, exist side by side.”
While there is no date set for this ordinance to be voted on, there will be another meeting to discuss this generation ban on April 7.
