Banned in Boston

Cigarette sales at Boston drugstores and on college campuses would be banned under sweeping new tobacco control rules likely to win initial approval today from health regulators.

The restrictions, which would give Boston among the toughest antismoking laws in the nation, could go into effect early next year. The rules would also stamp out smoking on the patios of restaurants and bars with outside service; tobacco use has been banned inside since 2003. And, after a five-year grace period, the city would shutter cigar bars, swank salons catering to tobacco connoisseurs, which were exempt from the earlier regulation.

The measures - opposed by drugstore chains and tobacco companies, which argue that the rules unfairly limit businesses' right to sell a legal product - place Boston at the vanguard of a campaign to further reduce cigarette smoking, especially among young people and the poor.

Starting later this month, smokers in San Francisco will no longer be able to buy cigarettes in pharmacies.

Concern about the health of restaurant and bar workers exposed to secondhand smoke prompted the push to prohibit cigarettes from those establishments' patios, among the last remaining public haunts of smokers, said Barbara Ferrer, the city's top health official.

And the city decided to target sales at the 74 pharmacies in Boston, she said in a telephone interview, because stocking tobacco, the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, is incompatible with the mission of a drugstore.

"Why, in a place where people go to get healthy and get information about staying healthy, would you want to sell something that has absolutely no redeeming value and ends up killing a lot of people?" said Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission.

"We know that about 10 percent of Boston high school students are still taking up tobacco smoking. Is there something else we can do here to stop that?" she said.

But Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco control specialist at Boston University School of Public Health, predicted that making sales illegal at pharmacies and college convenience stores will do little to dissuade the determined smoker.

"What it's going to do is simply shift the places where people get cigarettes," Siegel said.

Using public health law to bar pharmacies from selling cigarettes amounts to overreaching, he added.

"I just don't see the government's role in regulating the consistency of the mission of a store," Siegel said. "Just to extend this, should the public health mission also ban the sale of candy bars in pharmacies? If we're going to get rid of cigarettes, why don't we also get rid of soda? We know soda causes obesity."

Thanks to
Wendy McElroy