Board of Aldermen 05-14-2019 Page 22
So | appreciate when people doubt that this is going to work, you don’t have to believe me, look at the
research, look at the evidence in the rest of the country where this has been done and it has worked.
The other testimony that we’ve heard about people who are 18 are adults and ought to be able to
make their own choices. You know | understand that Libertarian argument that people ought to be
able to do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. But the truth is that
smoking does hurt other people, second-hand smoke hurts other people. The vaping, the aerosol from
vaping hurts other people; the people who smoke you’ve heard the statistics about how much that
costs, you know, it’s like $729 million dollars in NH for treating people with smoke-related diseases.
And we are all paying for that, not just the person who is sick, but we pay for it in higher insurance
premiums, because insurance companies have to get money from all of us in order to pay for the
people who they are treating for smoking-related diseases but also Medicaid, directly our tax money.
Our tax money pays for Veterans who unfortunately went to serve our country, risked their lives and
came away from it with a tobacco addiction. And my office is right next to the Dalianis House and |
see these poor guys out there smoking, some of them are on scooters with oxygen tanks. And they
are still smoking because of this addiction. And again | emphasize, people who smoke are not bad
people. They are people who have obtained this addiction and a lot of them will tell you, they want to
quit, they’ve tried to quit and they can’t quit. So if we can stop people from getting addicted in the first
place, | think we are doing them a favor. We are not doing a favor to people who are 18, 19 and 20 by
allowing them to become addicted. We did it for alcohol.
When New Hampshire raised the drinking age from 18 to 21 there was an over 90% reduction in
alcohol related deaths from that age group. So raising the age works and | hope that my fellow
Aldermen will support number one — amending this ordinance and then if its amended, hopefully
passing it.
Alderman Clemons
Just a simple request please roll call.
Alderman Klee
| actually am quite stunned to see this here because if | am not mistaken when this was brought
forward to the Personnel Committee there was only one person that voted for that and the rest of the
Committee voted against it. It was actually, the entire bill was defeated in the Committee, and | think it
was Alderman Clemons who said did all the hard work and in all fairness to all of us Aldermen that we
would bring it forward to it and you pretty much so said that that was the right thing. And | agreed with
it; | think it should have come forward. | think that if this does pass you probably will get this bill. | am
still very much against it; | don’t deny any of the science. | think the science is probably very, very
accurate. You continue to bring up the Needham statistics; well I'd like to remind everybody that the
median income in Needham is much higher. The education in Needham in much higher, the
population in Needham is about half of that of Nashua. Also some of the statistics that were prior to
this, Needham’s use of tobacco was already on the decline. So that’s a little thing that we need to add
to it and so on.
You mentioned about the licenses, the vertical / horizontal kind of license. | am not going to argue with
that but the truth is then the police officers do have to sit there with a calendar to say ok were they
born before this and that and | think that is probably what the officer was discussing. When Vermont
does pass it we will be surrounded by states who are no longer selling this which is why | think that
New Hampshire has to step us. And perhaps Senator Soucy was making the comment about that she
wanted to see what was going to happen out in the towns and the cities. | still think that the State
needs to take the responsibility and whether people want to agree with me or not, that’s just my feeling
and so on.
As far as raising the alcohol level, Nashua didn’t do it, Keene didn’t do it, Newmarket didn’t do it, Dover
didn’t do it; New Hampshire did it. And actually we were kind of forced to it, much like Massachusetts
