You’re heading to the golf course with a friend, and you stop at a convenience store to pick up some Red Bull and a couple of Black & Mild cigars. (You don’t smoke cigarettes, but you enjoy lighting up after 18 holes.) You show your ID. You’re over 21, so the sale is legal. But your friend, also over 21 and also an occasional cigar smoker, is denied because of the year he was born.
This scenario illustrates the problem at the core of the so-called Nicotine Free Generation bylaws (NFG) currently being debated by boards of health across Massachusetts. These policies are arbitrary, burdensome, and unlikely to produce meaningful public health benefits.
Under NFG rules, adults who work full-time jobs, raise families, are subject to being drafted into the service, and influence public policy – notionally – with their vote, are barred from purchasing nicotine products solely on account of the year they were born. NFG creates a two-tiered system of adulthood, enforced not by public-health officials or law enforcement officers but by retailers – often small independent ones – at the point of sale.
Proponents argue that NFG will accelerate the decline in the rate of smoking and eventually eliminate nicotine use altogether. But smoking rates were falling long before NFG entered the discussion. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2024 the smoking rate among American middle and high school students was a tiny 1.4%, an all-time low driven by cessation programs, 21-and-over laws, and decades of education.
There’s no evidence that layering a generational ban on top of those successful policies will improve outcomes materially. There is evidence, however, that NFG shifts enforcement onto businesses.
Brookline adopted the nation’s first NFG bylaw in 2024. The model has since spread to a handful of Bay State communities, but even supporters acknowledge the practical challenges. Store clerks must calculate eligibility not by age but by birth date — often at busy moments in front of impatient customers. Meantime, the same products are available online and in adjacent towns. So NFG doesn’t actually stop anyone from buying what they want.
Some local officials have raised concerns about fairness. In Barnstable, the Board of Health voted 4–1 against NFG. Board member Donald Guadagnoli summed up the issue succinctly: “If people from 250 years ago could (see this), they’d be shocked.”
Yarmouth’s experience illustrates how controversial NFG can become at the local level. Yarmouth’s Board of Health began discussing the policy earlier this spring, only for the Select Board to intervene after widespread public opposition. It still hasn’t been resolved.
The opponents’ concerns are well-founded. NFG doesn’t prevent access to nicotine through online sellers that don’t verify ages. It doesn’t stop adult consumers from traveling to neighboring towns that don’t have the restriction. It does, however, penalize the one group of stakeholders who consistently check IDs: law-abiding retailers.
Convenience stores already manage ID checks, monitor fuel sales, oversee lottery transactions, and engage in countless customer interactions. NFG adds another layer of complexity, compelling retail clerks to enforce an opaque prohibition on befuddled prospective customers who are adults by law but minors, in effect, in the eyes of the Commonwealth’s boards of health.
In the US, Massachusetts stands alone in pursuing this approach. That alone should prompt a pause. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that public health policy is effective only when it’s evidence-based, actionable, and widely accepted. NFG falls short on all three counts.
NFG is an illiberal distraction. The Supreme Judicial Court upheld Brookline’s policy as legal, but legality isn’t the same as soundness. There are better ways to eliminate smoking than impose an impractical mandate that creates a permanent class of disenfranchised adults. Massachusetts should stick with the tried-and-true: cessation programs, education, and enforcement.
As towns consider these regulations, they should ask themselves whether NFG meaningfully advances public health or instead creates needless confusion, inconsistency, and friction.
Alex Weatherall is owner of Sherborn Market and immediate past president of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association.