Massachusetts’ highest court on Friday upheld a groundbreaking bylaw in Brookline that bans tobacco sales in town to anyone born in the 21st century, opening the door to other cities and towns statewide to pursue similar rules.
In its ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit, known as Six Brothers v. Brookline, in which store owners argued Brookline’s novel tobacco sales ban was unconstitutional and conflicts with a 2018 statewide law that set the statewide legal minimum age to buy tobacco at 21 years old.
The Supreme Judicial Court rejected both arguments. State law expressly allows towns and cities — long considered “local community laboratories” for public health policies — to prohibit tobacco sales in full, the court ruled. Further, Brookline’s bylaw does not undercut state law but rather augments it, according to the high court, which argued the town has a “legitimate interest in mitigating tobacco use overall and in particular by minors.”
“The bylaw also is a rational alternative to an immediate and outright ban on sales of all tobacco products, preserving in-town sales to those [born before 2000] who may already suffer from addiction,” Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote for the court in its 33-page ruling.
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Brookline Town Meeting voters adopted the bylaw in 2020 that banned the sale of tobacco to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2000, in the Boston suburb of 60,000 people. The rule went into effect about a year later, and will gradually prohibit tobacco or e-cigarette sales to anyone in town at some distant point in the future, regardless of a person’s age.
The Brookline rule has been hailed as a novel effort to curb youth tobacco use by going far beyond setting a minimum age, effectively banning future generations from ever purchasing tobacco.
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The bylaw was the first of its kind in the United States, and remains a novelty on the entire planet: New Zealand had adopted a similar policy, but scrapped it last year after a right-leaning coalition won control of the government.
Others have approved more aggressive measures; two California cities — Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills — banned the sale of all tobacco products, for example. But Brookline is currently the only place in the world to implement a so-called generational sales ban, and is the first to survive a legal challenge from the tobacco industry on this front, said Mark Gottlieb, executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University’s School of Law, which represented Brookline in the lawsuit.
“Brookline is truly the world leader in this approach,” Gottlieb said. “It’s all clear in Massachusetts now [for others] to adopt this policy. I’d be surprised if we didn’t have a half dozen or more adopting this in 2024.”
Several Massachusetts towns have already signaled they want to emulate Brookline’s rules. Officials in Melrose, Stoneham, and Wakefield — three communities clustered north of Boston that share a health director — all held public hearings on like-minded proposed regulations, all of which would ban the sale of tobacco or e-cigarette products to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2004. Malden officials have weighed similar restrictions.
Health officials for all four towns either declined to comment or did not respond to requests Friday.
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“This is a watershed moment in the history of the tobacco wars,” Laurent Huber, executive director of the advocacy group Action on Smoking and Health, said in a statement. “It signals that we’ve moved from mitigating the death and disease from tobacco to ending it.”
The group of Brookline businesses seeking to overturn the bylaw argued that it violates equal protection guarantees in the state constitution. A ban, even implemented gradually, could have wide ramifications for convenience stores, where tobacco products account for more than one-quarter of merchandise sales nationally, according to a Massachusetts trade group representing local retailers.
The lawsuit effectively pitted some of the tobacco industry’s biggest players against Brookline and the state. American Snuff Co. — a subsidiary of the tobacco giant American Reynolds — argued in a court brief that allowing someone born at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, 1999, to buy cigarettes but permanently barring someone born one second later is “discriminatory treatment [that] cannot pass constitutional muster.”
The Supreme Judicial Court disagreed.
“Line drawing — a legislative necessity — does not, without more, make a law unconstitutional,” Wendlandt wrote.
The court also argued that the bylaw, as constructed, gives “sellers time to adjust to revenue losses that stem from shrinking tobacco product sales.”
Peter Brennan, executive director of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association, said he was unsure if retailers would seek to challenge the court decision at the federal level. But he said the trade organization was weighing “all legal options going forward.”
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“We think it’s a dangerous policy,” Brennan said of Brookline’s bylaw. “Adults deserve the right to make decisions about what products to purchase. We think the state was clear when it made the [minimum] age 21.”
The ruling immediately drew criticism from others in the business community. Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, suggested it could spur a patchwork of rules addressing sales throughout the state.
Having “351 different rules doesn’t make sense for interstate commerce,” Hurst wrote on X. “Local [government] should focus on schools, public safety, trash services, etc.”
The state of Massachusetts backed Brookline’s efforts, writing in a brief submitted to the court that the town is addressing “a legitimate health concern.” Governor Maura Healey approved Brookline’s rule when she was attorney general. Whenever a town adopts a new bylaw or amends one, it has to submit it to the attorney general’s office for approval.
A Healey spokesperson declined to comment on Friday’s ruling.
“Just having [the bylaw] in Brookline isn’t going to have an impact on public health across Massachusetts or the country. But you have to start somewhere,” said Sigalle Reiss, Brookline’s public health director. “It takes baby steps.”
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.