Cigarette sales ban receives initial okay from Boston board

By Stephen Smith and David Abel, Globe Staff

Boston health regulators today gave initial approval to sweeping new tobacco control rules that would ban cigarette sales at Boston drugstores and on college campuses.

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.

"Smoking and tobacco use is a major cause of preventable illness and death. We feel it's very important as a city that takes the health of its residents seriously we do all we can. We're really working to improve the health and well-being of our residents," said Paula A. Johnson, chairwoman of the Boston Public Health Commission.

The commission approved the new rules this afternoon, 4-0, after an hourlong hearing. The public will now get to comment, both in writing and at a public hearing that will be scheduled later.

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, Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the public health commission, said in a story in today's Globe.

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.

"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."

The stricter tobacco regulations - which also would block smoking in hotels, something that many hoteliers already do - were drafted at the direction of Public Health Commission board members and with the blessing of Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

The rules substantially increase fines against violators of existing tobacco regulations. Retailers caught selling to underage smokers now face a maximum penalty of $400; that would increase to $2,000.

Globe correspondent Casey Ramsdell contributed to this report.

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