Board of Aldermen 04-09-2019 Page 6
Joerel Nieves Hello everyone my name is Joerel Nieves, | am 18 | go Nashua South. | live at 9 Forge
Drive. | am going to leave all the big facts to them, they got all that. | am just here to say that this bill will
prevent our youth to you know make it harder for them to find ways to get it and that’s really all | had to say.
Enjoy the rest of the time.
Desne Bueso Hello my name is Desne Bueso | live at 86 B Kinsley Street. | am here to support this new
law. | believe that | represent the youth here in Nashua and from personal experience | know that a lot of
high schools, middle schools, they all have access to this. And they all start addiction early and | do
believe that we are the future and if we keep this up it will not end well. And | do believe that this may not
ban anything as the gentleman said before me, but it is a first step in getting somewhere, because you
must take steps forward to get to your destination. Thank you.
Albee Budnitz Hello I’m Albee Budnitz, | live at 27 Wheaton Drive here in Nashua. | first will reiterate or not
reiterate but | am here to support Mr. Jette’s Bill and | will support everything that Jan Valuk said prior. | just
want to make maybe 2 or 3 new points. | think the most important point, well one that was brought up
earlier, vaping is not FDA approved for tobacco cessation, it may be at some point, and that’s being looked
at but it is not approved for tobacco cessation right now. Number two, by increasing the age to 271, it will
not solve all problems, but it is part of a community-wide, comprehensive program that has proven with
combustible tobacco use to be probably the second most important advance that we’ve made in the last 70
years in public and population health after vaccination which is another story but we won't get into that
tonight.
But | teach Public & Population Health to 3“ and 4" year medical students at Dartmouth University of New
England and this is what they are getting. Two more points, one is that increasing the age to 21 has been
shown and | have the backup data for that, to reduce initiation of use by 12 to 17 year old kids by 20% to
30%. That in turn results in remarkably reduced morbidity and mortality later in life. It is not like opioids
where you die then at 18 or 20 or 30, you don’t die until you’re old, at 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s and | am well
beyond those decades, so fortunately haven’t smoked. But it will save that morbidity and mortality for our
youth when they get older.
Finally, just to reiterate Jan’s point, the brain is not fully developed until the mid-20’s, maybe the early 20’s
for girls, mid-20’s for boys. And those brains are unbelievably susceptible to Nicotine which is a gateway
drug to opioids and alcohol. Thank you.
Mike Apfelberg Good evening, Mike Apfelberg, 7 Edson Street, proud resident of Ward 3 speaking here in
support of the tobacco 21 legislation. So you know according to Stanford University and the National
Institutes for Health, as Jan and Albee mentioned, the brain is developing through the age of 25. And up to
that point in time, it is therefore more susceptible to becoming addicted. Addiction is a brain disease, we
have come to learn this. The problem with Nicotine is that every time you take a hit off of a cigarette or a
vaping device, every hit that you get of Nicotine corresponds to a hit of Dopamine being released in the
brain and that is what makes this drug Nicotine so addictive in and of itself.
Now Nicotine has not necessarily been proven to be carcinogenic but it has been shown to have a strong
linkage to cancer. It is definitely known to create cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal diseases, it
decreases your immune response and it can have harmful effects on your reproductive life in later years.
One of the things that we’ve heard as an argument, why we should not move forward with this legislation is
because you can do a lot of things at the age of 18. How many times have we heard this evening and on
social media, you can send kids off to fight for us in war at the age of 18. | would remind you there are
some things you can’t do at the age of 18. And there are reasons for that. You cannot purchase and
consume alcohol, you cannot go to a nightclub, you can’t drive a school bus, you cannot adopt a child, you
can’t fly a commercial airplane, you can’t rent a car, you cannot buy a handgun or ammunition for that
handgun according to Federal Law. In Massachusetts at least, you cannot purchase marihuana.
So why is that we limit those things to people for later years? It is because we know that adolescents are
not ready to make each and every decision in life. And so that could include the smoking of tobacco
