Massachusetts Law on Cigarettes
 

While I am not a smoker, couldn't help but notice an article in today's Village Daily Sun, regarding a Brookline City bylaw being approved to ban cigarette and tobacco sales to anyone born in the 21st century. Upheld by the States highest court.

What next, Alcohol, Birth Control, Ice Cream?

So, in 2050, a person 51 years old will be buying cigarettes for their 49-year-old neighbors at $50/pack.

While at it, why not ban people born before 1980, since they have already been exposed to enough smoke.

Not picking on smokers but rather the rule makers.

Brookline MA tries to emulate their counterparts across The Charles in Cambridge. Thus the nickname, the Peoples Republic of...

What happens in Brookline Mass, has no relevence to any of us.

Should just outlaw it all together
Cigarettes kills 480,000 a year - legal to buy
Marijuana kills 0 a year - illegal
Makes since

In UK, 20 cigarettes is now £16. (That's approx. $20.50)

Although I’m not the OP, everything that sets precedent in this country has relevance. Unless your travels are confined to TV proper, it’s important to watch out for this kind of nonsense. It’s like bike lanes where there was once parking spots and travel lanes. Every action has a reaction

I wonder if that is age discrimination?

Apparently, it started in New Zealand and the UK is considering a similar law!

In 2022, New Zealand passed a similar law intended to impose a lifetime ban on young people buying cigarettes by mandating that tobacco can’t ever be sold to anybody born on or after Jan. 1, 2009. The country’s new prime minister has said he plans to repeal the law.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last year proposed raising the legal age that people in England can buy cigarettes by one year, every year until it is eventually illegal for the whole population.

C.S. Lewis called these people "omnipotent moral busybodies."

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

I think there are some people that would even ban ketchup!!

Oh, but it does.

Massachusetts has banned the sale of Menthol cigarettes. The FDA has announced plans to ban Menthol cigarettes all over the USA.

The currently controversy, is that plan is discriminatory, because African-Americans are more likely to be "addicted" to menthol cigarettes ... of course, that's because the big, bad tobacco companies, specifically marketed Menthol cigarettes to African-Americans.

I don't make this stuff up, I'm only reporting the news.

FDA says it will finalize ban on menthol tobacco products ‘in coming months’ | CNN

I have a friend who never smoked a cigarette but was an avid pot smoker and got lung cancer.
Edibles only for him now.
Make sense?

Not true. Our daughter, my older brother, and two of my nieces live there. And Brookline is the bedroom community for many of the best doctors in the entire world. It has great relevance to me.

Anecdote
 

Worked a few summers in an International Harvester foundry - a *very* dirty place. Coal mine level dirty. My black brethren not only tended to smoke Kools, but opened their packs from the "wrong" end. Told me it was for keeping the filter tips clean. Brilliant.

Bans
 

Yeah and let’s make it a legal requirement that all kids must have both a pistol and rifle and to strip them of independent cognitive thought. Oh already true you say ? Awful

i think it's bogus. on any purchase, (within reason) i should be able to make my own decisions. the US is becoming a powerful nanny-state

Agree

Health Nazis strike again.

Keep burying your head.

What happens anywhere in this country that takes away our freedom is relevant to us. We could be next

Fools and Their Money
 

QUOTE=mtdjed;2310579]While I am not a smoker, couldn't help but notice an article in today's Village Daily Sun, regarding a Brookline City bylaw being approved to ban cigarette and tobacco sales to anyone born in the 21st century. Upheld by the States highest court.

What next, Alcohol, Birth Control, Ice Cream?

So, in 2050, a person 51 years old will be buying cigarettes for their 49-year-old neighbors at $50/pack.

While at it, why not ban people born before 1980, since they have already been exposed to enough smoke.

Not picking on smokers but rather the rule makers.[/QUOTE]

If smokers want to pay big bucks to hasten their own deaths, it is their business. However all the butts they throw out their cars and leave on the golf courses and roads is what needs to be outlawed. Some are real slobs.

The thing is, smoking affects all of us because of the health risks associated with smoking. Smokers are costing us billions of dollars.
Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people annually – more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined. Tobacco costs the U.S. over $300 billion in health care expenditures and more than $365 billion in lost productivity each year.

If smokers want to pay big bucks to hasten their own deaths, it is their business. However all the butts they throw out their cars and leave on the golf courses and roads is what needs to be outlawed. Some are real slobs.[/QUOTE]

Not to open a new thread but in addition to what you stated (butts), there are also water bottles, nips and fast food refuse all over the place as well. We have a littering fetish in this country that has survived generations. All the laws and ordinances in this country have done very little to mitigate it. Singapore has an interesting coping mechanism: caning! ;) Now back to your regular programming

Well, this makes so little sense.
They have legalised the purchase and use of recreational cannabis/marijuana by people over age 21. (visit-massachusetts.com) You cannot consume this in public places however. They also legalised the growing and possessing of M in late 2016.
Seems like prohibition taught us some lessons on banning things in our country’s past.
I know many M advocates are sure and certain that smoking M is not like smoking cigarettes. However, I have never believed this. We have a few relatives who were heavy pot smokers for decades. Painful esophagus cancer was one of the causes of death.
Anyway, this is just my BFO

Not really. I'm sure there are folks out there who have had lung cancer, who have never smoked either grass OR tobacco.

Not the OP but the point is well taken. Tobacco lawsuits have done little (except for attorneys) to prevent usage or lung disease. Same with alcohol and liver disease....scratch tickets and gambling addiction and on and on. I'm all for education but stop short on prohibition. With the obvious restriction on minors.

...but because the Federal government benefits by adding special taxes to tobacco products, they tax it and allow legal sale of it for "recreational purposes" instead of outlawing it. Unlike cannabis, which is STILL classified in the same category as heroin on a federal level.

Tobacco produces nicotine, which is a federally regulated drug. The fact that it's available for sale at all on the public market, indicates that the government is making bank on it. If they weren't, it'd be illegal nationwide, because tobacco causes cancer. There's no "but" about it, there's no "yeah well this other study says" about it. It causes cancer, and there is no redeeming social value for its existence. It does nothing FOR anyone, it's addictive, habit-forming, causes people to choke and cough and leaves a film of tar on the windows and walls, makes a person smell bad, and results in thousands of people dying every year from lung cancer directly caused by inhaling tobacco smoke.

I smoked for many years. Was finally able to quit, with the help of Chantix. The "smoking cessation" lobbies also want tobacco to be legal, and push to keep it legal, because without nicotine addicts, they'd be out of business.

It's just a money grab, at the expense of human lives.

If the quoted post was written to advocate making tobacco illegal across-the-board, there is a very good argument, apart from the infringement on an individual's right to make their own choices, to be made for that. Unfortunately there is no greater venue for hypocrisy in this great nation of ours than tobacco. And it can be summarized in two words.

Cash Cow.

I quit smoking cigarettes over 35 years ago now. I quit because (at $0.60 a pack more or less in Minnesota at that time) they were too expensive, and I was downing nearly 3 packs per day at the time. Today? Well, I was there a few months back and saw a person buy a carton of cigs at a convenience store, handed the clerk $100 and got back a couple of bucks, and those weren't even the front-line brands. I remember thinking that at that price, if I was still hooked on cigarettes, I could drink myself to death on some pretty pricy booze before I could smoke myself to death. $200 plus per week to feed an addiction is a LOT of money.

For those of you not knowing, Minnesota is and has been a hotbed of sanctimony for a loooooong time. We had the requisite lawsuit against Big Tobacco (as did most states), collected a bunch of money that was supposed to go toward correcting the ills caused by tobacco but didn't, and suffered (well, I didn't, because I had quit by that time) the price of tobacco products reaching astronomical levels. There are still the busybodies extant up there, the public crusaders who decry the ills of tobacco to all and sundry, but who will NEVER call for the total sales ban on tobacco because the proceeds from those sales (and lawsuits) go towards financing pork that most of us can only imagine.

I don't advocate banning tobacco in any form. But if you're going to advocate such a thing, at least do so honestly.

Cigarettes
 

Might as well roll up a $20 bill and light it up. Cigarettes are such a waste and stinks up people/places. Yuck!!

Ohiobuckeye
 

I miss not getting the paper in TV, here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area a paper here is $2.50 per day & to get it for a yr. It’s around $500. a yr. tax are skyrocketing right now, our property taxes are $6,2??.?? a yr. & we only have a 1700 sq. ft. home. Lots to do here but expensive to live here.We miss TV!

Tobacco related deaths in this country don't cost our society a damn penny. The cost of a pack of cigarettes is 90% tax money that Uncle Sam gets from the smokers. The government gets hundreds of millions of $$$$ from the smokes.

After my father (2 packs a day) died of lung cancer, my mother (1 pack a day) quit smoking. A year later, she realized that even on her relatively low, fixed income, she had saved enough to go on a cruise. She went on several cruises after that. And this was nearly 30 years ago when cigarettes hadn't been taxed into the stratosphere.

Having lost several relatives and friends to cancer, I have long been virulently anti-tobacco and wished the government would ban the sale of tobacco, a benefit-free poison delivery system. However, the government also once banned the sale of alcohol and all the Prohibition did was create a generation of rich mobsters just like the ban on the sale of recreational drugs has created generations of rich narco traffickers. There is no saving people from their own self destruction, I guess.

A bunch of crazies are in city and state government everywhere. These little insidious laws are "tests" that they hope will eventually become nationwide. 20% of people that smoke get lung cancer. 20% of lung cancer cases occur in people that have never smoked.

If smokers want to pay big bucks to hasten their own deaths, it is their business. However all the butts they throw out their cars and leave on the golf courses and roads is what needs to be outlawed. Some are real slobs.[/QUOTE]

But it is our business if people want to smoke themselves to death. It impacts our health care system. According to the American Cancer Society, smoking kills more people than alcohol, car crashes, suicide, AIDS, murder, and drugs combined. Smoking causes 87% of lung cancer deaths. Lung cancer is the leading type of cancer in men and women. During 2010-2014, an estimated 11.7% (95% CI = 11.6%, 11.8%) of U.S. annual healthcare spending could be attributed to adult cigarette smoking, translating to annual healthcare spending of more than $225 billion dollars based on total personal healthcare expenditures reported in 2014.

"Tobacco related deaths in this country don't cost our society a damn penny. The cost of a pack of cigarettes is 90% tax money that Uncle Sam gets from the smokers. The government gets hundreds of millions of $$$$ from the smokes."

True words.

What a lot of folks don't realize is that tobacco can be grown, and is legal to do so, (at least it was three years ago when I checked) in all 50 states. Don't try selling it though...Uncle Sam may have something to say about that!

I was visiting my sister in a rural part of Connecticut, & I was surprised to drive past fields of tobacco. Connecticut with its rocky soil & a bit of a cold snap for 6 months or so a year, is not well known as an agricultural state. :) I guess I had always thought Virginia & North Carolina had the tobacco industry all sewed up.

You got me curious.

The highest tax is $5.35 a pack in New York. The lowest is Georgia at $0.35. the average state cigarette tax is $1.93 a pack. I didn't know what the cost of a pack is but if it's $4 a pack about 50% tax.


I should have kept reading, the info above is state tax. Federal tax is $1.01 a pack. The highest in the country is Chicago with all tax included is $7.16. wow

The area around Windsor, CT, was once a tobacco dynasty. There are still a bunch of farms that produce leaves to wrap some of the finest cigars in the world.

All that is true, but the topic was a government banning sales to certain persons based upon an arbitrary age discrimination beyond youth. Ban it on public streets, parks, beaches etc. Ban selling it in all stores in your jurisdiction. You might not get reelected, but at least the restriction could be understood and not discriminate against a class of people.

Basically - they're banning the purchase of cigarettes, but grandfathering in most people who've been smoking legally up until that point. I get the logic behind it.

There are still dry towns in several states, where alcohol is not allowed to be sold. No liquor stores, no beer, no bars, no wine at restaurants.

I don't see any problem with a town that wants to gradually eliminate smoking. No one has a constitutional right to smoke. "Freedom to inhale poisonous fumes and exhale them into public air" is not a right, or even a privilege. It's more of an oversight. Kudos to the town in MA for starting the process of correcting that oversight.

There was already a minimum age (21) to buy tobacco in MA, they've just raised the age, and capped it at a specific birth year.

Well, it is the Chicago way! :eclipsee_gold_cup: home of Al Alfonzo Capone the Boy Scout of Chicago when it comes to city officials :pepper2:

The cheapest cigarettes in the USA, are in Missouri, with and average price of $6.25. The average price in the USA is around $8. Wawa is about $11 for brand names.