FLORIDA POLITICS – Expect butts to keep littering beaches.
Legislation empowering local governments to limit smoking in publicly owned outdoor spaces died after the Senate Rules Committee did not hear it.
Sen. Joe Gruters, a Sarasota Republican, has filed some iteration of the bill for years. Gruters acknowledged the bill this year is “dead.”
The matter has been of particular significance within Gruters’ coastal district, which includes Siesta Key, one of Florida’s top beaches.
Siesta Key has multiple times been ranked the best beach in America by Dr. Beach.
That would happen with greater frequency, Gruters said, if smoking were banned, as Dr. Stephen Leatherman, the Florida International University professor behind the Dr. Beach rankings, gives points for prohibiting cigarettes …
In that sense, the bill served as a testament to the still-burning influence of tobacco in Tallahassee … Click here to read full story.
New Zealand wants to ban cigarette sales to anyone born after 2004 as part of plan to make nation ‘smoke free’ by 2025
New Zealand is currently mulling a series of proposals aimed at eliminating smoking in the country, including a radical initiative that would prohibit the sale of tobacco to an entire generation.
Under the country’s Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan, New Zealand hopes to gradually increase the legal smoking age and ultimately prohibit cigarette sales to anyone born after 2004. [Aotearoa is the name for New Zealand used by the nation’s indigenous Polynesian people. – Ed.]
The initiative also calls for a significant reduction in the level of nicotine allowed in tobacco and places restrictions on where cigarettes can be sold. The government would also set a minimum price for all tobacco products.
As the name of the plan suggests, the goal is to phase out tobacco use in the country over the next few years, creating a “smoke free” New Zealand by 2025.
The country’s Health Ministry explained that while smoking rates have declined over the past decade, “much work still needs to be done,” particularly to reduce tobacco use among “Maori, Pacific peoples and those living in our most disadvantaged communities.”
New Zealanders have been invited to “provide feedback” about the action plan … Click here to read more.
