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Free Nicotine Patch Giveaway for Massachusetts Veterans! 

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has designed a FREE quit-smoking offer especially for veterans.

By calling 1-800-Try-To-Stop, veterans and their families will receive tailored counseling over the phone and, if eligible, a FREE 4-week supply of nicotine patches.

After a simple medical screening over the phone, medically eligible veterans, their families, and survivors will receive a Quit Kit with the patch kits, tips on quitting and informational resources.

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Free Nicotine Patches Now Available to Massachusetts Veterans and Their Families  

The Massachusetts Department of Veterans' Services (DVS) and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) today announced a nicotine patch giveaway for Massachusetts veterans, their family members, and survivors who want to quit smoking.

Massachusetts veterans and their family members who call the Massachusetts Smokers Helpline at 1-800-Try-To-Stop will receive a free four-week supply of nicotine patches valued at $100 retail, along with informational resources on the benefits of quitting smoking, and tips on how to stop. Program participants will also receive free telephone support to help them quit. The nicotine patch giveaway program will run through June 30, 2009.

Massachusetts veterans smoke at a higher rate than the general adult population: 24 percent as opposed to 18 percent, when adjusted for age (based on figures from 2005-07). This new quit-smoking offer for veterans is a joint effort of DVS and DPH.

Speaking at the campaign kick-off event at the State House today, Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray urged veterans and their families to take advantage of this free offer.

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Free nicotine patches now available to veterans and families  

The Massachusetts Department of Veterans' Services and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health are sponsoring a nicotine patch giveaway for Massachusetts veterans, their family members and survivors who want to quit smoking.

Massachusetts veterans and their family members who call the Massachusetts Smokers Helpline at 1-800-Try-To-Stop will receive a free four-week supply of nicotine patches valued at $100 retail, along with informational resources on the benefits of quitting smoking and tips on how to stop. Program participants will also receive free telephone support to help them quit. The nicotine patch giveaway program will run through June 30, 2009.

Massachusetts veterans smoke at a higher rate than the general adult population: 24 percent as opposed to 18 percent, when adjusted for age (based on figures from 2005-07).

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Veterans urged to quit smoking  

SAUGUS-It is not uncommon to see World War II or even Viet Nam era photos of soldiers smoking cigarettes and generals smoking cigars, but it is an image the state’s Veterans and Federal Affairs Committee is trying to change.

The committee, which includes Sen. Thomas M. McGee, D-Lynn, as chairman and Rep. Mark Falzone, D- Saugus, as vice-chairman, is urging veterans to take advantage of the state’s new veteran smoking cessation program. The program, launched last month, encourages veterans to quit by providing a free four-week supply of nicotine patches.

Not only were pictures of smoking plentiful but during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, but it was also standard practice for soldiers to receive cigarettes in their rations. As a result of this and other factors that elevate addiction risks, the Department of Veterans Affairs believes, “veterans are disproportionately affected by smoking-related illnesses.”

In Massachusetts, approximately 24 percent of the veteran population or 100,000 veterans smoke.

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Stores barred from selling tobacco for two days  

Wal-Mart and the Big Y supermarket were forbidden to sell tobacco products on Monday and Tuesday of this week and fined $200 each for failing a quarterly Board of Health tobacco compliance check.

The Board of Health over the past few years has conducted stings on stores that sell tobacco products three or four times a year, said local health officials.

"We take it very seriously," said Health Director Robin Chapell. "We don't want anyone selling to anyone underage."

She said the board contacts the state Department of Public Heath to employ someone who is under 18 and looks under 18.

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Smoking banned on Barnstable public beaches 

HYANNIS - Starting next spring, smokers will no longer be allowed to light up at Barnstable beaches.

Town Manager John Klimm today announced a smoking ban at Barnstable's 13 public beaches and ponds.

The ban, implemented at the request of the town's Recreation Committee, makes Barnstable the first town on the Cape, and one of few around the state, to ban smoking.

"The fundamental decision was based on the repeated requests of our users to do more in terms of beach cleanliness," Klimm said yesterday. "Filth on the beach, especially cigarette butts, is always one of the biggest complaints."

Each year, the smoking ban will be in effect each year during the tourist season, from May 15-Sept. 15. During that time, smoking will only be allowed in specified smoking areas, to be reserved in the parking lot at each beach and pond.

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Tobacco compliance 

The Board of Health recently completed undercover tests on all 27 Arlington tobacco retailers, and none failed the compliance check. One of the stores was closed at the time.

Arlington Youth Health & Safety Coalition Director Colleen Leger and Natasha Thorne, health inspector, traveled around on Dec. 5 with two underage teenage girls from the Mystic Valley Tobacco Control in Malden, and neither was able to buy any tobacco products, Thorne told the Board of Health.

However, CVS in the Center, both Walgreens, and Mass Convenience have all failed to attend a tobacco compliance training seminar.

That means those four stores will have to remove tobacco from their shelves Jan. 1, 2009, and will not have permission to resume tobacco sales until they complete the training.

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EDITORIAL: The nanny state 

It's hard to demonize the well-meaning busybodies next door. They voted for Barack Obama, may shop at Whole Foods or the co-op, and are probably as green as their budgets allow. Their fetish for jackboots, however, is their own guilty pleasure. . . .

With its just-adopted ban on the sale of tobacco on college campuses and in pharmacies, Boston has become a poster child for the Nanny States of America. City Hall knows best. And if you disagree, hang a sign around your neck that reads BAD PERSON, then go stand in the corner. Better yet, revive the stocks and pillories our puritan forefathers once used to publicly shame wrongdoers. Wonder if Paula Johnson, MD, PhD, and the chair of Boston's Public Health Commission, has her own secret agenda? Mother Johnson, along with the rest of the commission, has just enacted some of the nation's most restrictive tobacco ordinances.

College students, of course, have long been treated like children. . . .

Thanks to a groundswell of opposition by patrons of the 11 cigar bars and establishments that offer hookahs, the nannies have allowed a 10-year exemption before seeking to snuff them out. Who says the nannies are heartless?

Our nannies and the right-wing radicals who soon will be evicted from the White House share this in common: they believe in the government's power to coerce, to bully.

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No more tobacco sold at pharmacies 

Starting Feb. 12, no pharmacy in Boston will be allowed to sell cigarettes. That restriction is just one of several approved by the Boston Public Health Commission's board last week aimed at tightening tobacco regulations.

Along with pharmacies, educational institutions may not sell tobacco products. The board also voted to immediately expand workplace-smoking restrictions to include adjacent areas such as patios and loading docks, and to prohibit smoking in hotels, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts in Boston. . . .

The new regulations also prevent any new smoking bars from opening, such as hookah or cigar bars, but the ones already in operation can remain open for 10 years. There are no smoking bars in the Parkway area.

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• West Side bans smoking bars  

WEST SPRINGFIELD - Hookah bars are banned, but new food service regulations are on hold.

The Board of Health Wednesday voted 3-0 to make smoking bars, which include cigar bars and hookah bars, illegal.

Donald J. Wilson, tobacco control coordinator with the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said many communities do not have outright bans, although some, such as Amherst, interpret their tobacco use regulations as not permitting them. Others have interpreted their regulations as allowing them because there is no explicit language barring them.

The Northampton Health Board, for example, initially approved an application for a hookah bar earlier this fall, but reversed its decision in December.

At present, the state regulates smoking bars only through the Department of Revenue.

Six communities have Department of Revenue approved smoking bars - Boston, Worcester, Sudbury, Shrewsbury, Fitchburg and Barnstable.

"The easiest way is to make it clear we don't allow them," Wilson said.

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SILVERGLATE: Big Tobacco’s health research: What are these university folks smoking, anyway?  

One of the rare voices of sanity to come through this morass of pious bleating is that of researcher Rami Tzafriri of MIT. He defends his use of tobacco money “that does not compromise my independence.” It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that such sanity and honesty emanate from MIT, an institution still devoted to rational thought rather than to the latest intellectual and pseudo-political fashions of the day. . . .

But as long as the ACLU was in control of how the money was spent, Glasser rightly refused to knuckle under to the PC crowd.

Hey – if the universities decide to do investigations of the good moral character of their donors as well as the ways in which they made their fortunes, I’d like to volunteer to be on that committee. I can probably get material for a few truly awesome columns, if not a screenplay or two.

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SALETAN: Tobacco: Banned in Boston 

Now they've breach another line between paternalism for children and paternalism for adults. The Boston Public Health Commission has just banned the sale of all tobacco products at colleges. Not high schools. Colleges. . . .

In other words, college students (henceforth known as "the younger population") are so vulnerable to smoking and to deception about the harms of smoking that their access to any tobacco products on campus must be legally forbidden.

It's true that laws across the United States set the legal drinking age at 21. But those laws are based on the argument that alcohol makes people aged 18 to 20 drive dangerously. Where's the evidence that chewing tobacco makes these people drive dangerously?

To repeat: I detest smoking. But if there's no secondhand smoke and no secondhand driving effects, what are the grounds for telling a 20-year-old college student—let alone a 25-year-old professional-school student—that tobacco is off-limits? And if that kind of paternalism can be extended so easily from minors to 25-year-olds, who's next?

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Cigarette likely behind condo fire  

A fire at a condominium complex off Topsfield Road on Saturday appears to have been started by a carelessly discarded cigarette on a couch, the fire chief said yesterday.

The fire started shortly before 7 p.m. at 400 Colonial Drive in a second-floor unit.

There were no injuries.

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Court Says Group Can Sue Altria for Fraud in ‘Light’ Cigarette Advertising 

The 1965 law established federal health warning labeling requirements for cigarettes. It also mandated that no “requirement or prohibition based on smoking and health shall be imposed under state law” regarding advertising or promotion of cigarettes packaged with the requisite labeling.

That provision, the court ruled, did not pre-empt a fraud claim by the Maine smokers because such a claim is not based on smoking and health.

“We conclude . . . that the Labeling Act does not pre-empt state-law claims like respondents’ that are predicated on the duty not to deceive,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the court’s opinion.

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EDITORIAL: Overreach by tobacco police chokes off freedom  

Boston's ban on cigar bars -- businesses established specifically to provide a haven for those who choose to smoke -- bespeaks antismoking zealotry far beyond a health board's proper role. The fact that the cigar bars were given 10 years to close down suggests even the antismoking crusaders on the commission were less than comfortable about shutting down legal business enterprises by government fiat.

Equally arrogant was the commission's ban on tobacco sales in pharmacies, reflecting members' single-minded belief that they are justified in ensuring that no citizen may indulge in any habit or behavior they deem inappropriate.

Regrettably, it's part of a spreading trend. Some communities already ban smoking in private clubs, and others have given serious consideration to making it illegal to smoke in one's own home -- and even outdoors.

To be sure, smoking is a noisome, expensive habit that more and more people wisely choose to avoid. For those who choose otherwise, however, tobacco remains a legal product -- contrary to the overreaching zeal of the Boston commission. The time has come to draw a bright line between government's role in protecting citizens from health risks to which they are unwittingly subjected and from risks citizens willingly accept in the pursuit of happiness.

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