Somerville has rung the death knell for nicotine products and the businesses that sell them. On March 20, 2025, the Somerville Board of Health hosted a forum to discuss a proposed ordinance replacing the age to buy nicotine products with one based on birth year. Just five days later, on March 25, the ordinance was passed unanimously, making anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2005 ineligible to purchase any form of nicotine product. The ordinance went into effect on May 1, 2025, but it wasn’t until last month that the first wave of young adults were affected by it. I believe that, while well-intentioned, this ordinance does not effectively fulfill its goal of reducing nicotine use among young adults and instead will kill local businesses and effectuate no real change in access to products.
Somerville is surrounded by five cities, towns, and neighborhoods: Cambridge; Medford; Everett; Arlington; and Charlestown, Boston. Because Somerville is the only municipality of the six that has enacted a ban on nicotine products, it’s more than likely that people will make the short commute to obtain nicotine elsewhere. It’s important to note that the regulation does not prohibit possession—only purchase. As such, Somerville isn’t preventing young adults from getting nicotine; they’re making it marginally inconvenient at the expense of small businesses.
The effect on these businesses isn’t immediate. There’s a small number of young adults who have turned 21 after the prohibitionary date, and even fewer are purchasing nicotine products, but the impact will only worsen. A few years from now, nearly every Tufts student will have been born after Jan. 1, 2005, leading to vastly reduced revenue from college students. According to a survey conducted by Statista, 24.8% of undergraduate college students use some form of nicotine product daily, and 44% use nicotine products at least once a month. By those numbers, 3,135 Tufts students have used nicotine in the last month. That is a colossal amount of business that these companies will lose to their competitors next door.
According to Vertical IQ, the majority of specialized vape shops, which are the only stores allowed to sell nicotine pouches under the new ordinance, operate out of a single location, indicating that they are not part of larger chains. We can fairly assume that the majority of these shops in Somerville, if not all of them, operate similarly. No profits from chain locations elsewhere will buffer the losses that these Somerville businesses will face. Rather, they will fall almost exclusively on Somerville’s small business owners. Somerville has, in effect, doomed a sector of its local economy only to boost the profitability of its neighbors.
My other issue with this proposal is that I find it difficult to justify an action of this magnitude from an unelected body. The Somerville Board of Health has three members, all appointed by the mayor of Somerville. There is an argument that a mayor’s appointment is democratic insofar as an elected official’s decisions are an extension of the will of their constituents. However, the board utilized power similar to that of a legislative body while being appointed as bureaucrats. I think it’s setting a bad precedent to enact major reforms to entire industries that revoke future generations’ access to a historically legal drug at the whim of an unelected body. Laws were passed in Needham and Brookline to the same effect, which begs the question: if the proposal was so widely popular in Somerville, why didn’t the democratically elected city council pass a resolution?
I’m not going to opine on any questions of personal liberty in this debate—there are good arguments on both sides for people’s right to decide their nicotine habits. I do believe, though, that Somerville’s passing of this regulation was a bad decision. For a policy like this to be effective, it needs to occur, at minimum, on a statewide basis and ideally be passed by its legislature, which is accountable to its constituents. A statewide policy improves its efficacy, enforcement of the law, and its ability to act as a rallying call to similarly-minded constituent bases across the country. I also believe that, while it would kill more businesses than a Somerville-specific ban, the burden of the legislation would affect the entire industry, preventing the companies on the periphery of Somerville from expanding their operations. If the goal is to prevent young adults from falling into nicotine addiction, pumping business into other parts of the state hardly succeeds in its purported goal of winding down the tobacco industry. For these reasons, Somerville’s Nicotine-Free Generation is a bad policy due to its ineffectiveness at ending nicotine use for future generations.
Photo by TJ Reiter, February 1, 2026