• March 19, 2024

Health Board members quit their ‘anti-tobacco habit’

A Health Board that had proposed a tobacco-products sales ban in a small US town has voted down the proposal, according to a story by O’Ryan Johnson for the Boston Herald.
If the proposal had been accepted, Westminster (population 7,277 in 2010 according to Wikipedia), in Worcester County, Massachusetts, would become the first community in the US to ban all tobacco sales.
The list of banned items would have included cigarettes, chewing tobacco and electronic cigarettes.
A meeting called earlier this month to discuss a proposal was ended prematurely after shouting broke out over a no-clapping rule.
Now, Johnson has reported, Westminster Health Board members, faced with a fuming citizenry, have decided to quit their ‘anti-tobacco habit’.
Opponents of the ban – bent on preserving American freedoms – were cheered when board members Ed Simoncini and Peter Munro voted to stop the ban. “The town is not in favor of the proposal, and therefore I am not in favor of the proposal,” Simoncini declared.
Although voting down the ban was seen as preserving American freedoms in general rather than the right to buy tobacco in particular; it was a big win for small businesses, which had argued that customers who stopped in to buy cigarettes left also with bread and milk; so that tobacco was critical to the businesses bottom line.