Gouldsboro adopts tobacco-free policy

By Letitia Baldwin, The Ellsworth American

April 15, 2022

GOULDSBORO — Smoking any tobacco, synthetic nicotine or plant-derived product is no longer allowed inside or within 20 feet of the town office, recreation center, women’s club, fire stations and other town-owned facilities.

The town’s newly adopted tobacco-free policy includes the transfer station and public areas such as the Prospect Harbor Park and Jones Pond recreational facility. The ban applies to all town-owned, leased, or rented vehicles. Violators will be fined a $100 civil penalty.

At their March 31 meeting, selectmen voted 5-0 to adopt the policy, which forbids “inhaling, exhaling, burning or carrying any lighted or heated cigar, cigarette, pipe or joint or any other lighted or heated tobacco or plant product intended for inhalation, including hookahs and marijuana, whether natural or synthetic in any manner or in any form” inside or less than 20 feet from its municipal buildings and outdoor facilities. The use of electronic smoking devices, “which create an aerosol or vapor” and non-smoked marijuana products such as edibles and dabs or extracts are prohibited too.

The policy, which took effect April 1, defines tobacco as all products containing or derived from tobacco such as “cigarettes, cigars, little cigars, cigarillos, bidis [unprocessed tobacco wrapped in leaves], kreteks [unfiltered clove cigarettes]” and all smokeless and dissolvable tobacco products such as “dip, spit/spitless, snuff, snus, and nasal tobacco.”

Select Board Chairman Dana Rice says Gouldsboro has always had an unwritten ban on smoking inside and outside its municipal facilities, but the time has come to formalize it.

“I am a smoker. I smoke a pipe. I know others find it offensive and it’s unhealthy,” Rice said Monday. “It’s a nasty habit, but I don’t look down on anyone who smokes.”

The initiative to draft and enact a policy followed a Jan. 20 selectmen’s meeting where Healthy Acadia’s Community Health Coordinator Mia Petrini made a case for Gouldsboro to join other Hancock County towns in adopting a tobacco-free policy. Bar Harbor, Ellsworth, Hancock, Mariaville, Mount Desert, and Tremont are among the other communities that have put such a policy in place. In her presentation, Petrini noted that 2,400 people die of smoking-related illnesses every year. Tobacco use causes 29 percent of all the state’s cancer deaths. She said tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable death and disability in the United States. No exposure to secondhand smoke is safe, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Click here to read this story in the Ellsworth American.