New Hampshire Used the State Budget to Raise the Smoking Age to 19

I’m not a fan of legislative leaders hiding unrelated legislation in a budget. It’s a trick. Budgets will get passed eventually. Stuffing changes that failed to pass in the House or Senate needs to stop. So, how about one that was never a bill at all?

This is clearly from the “pass it to see what’s in it” category of which statists are so proud. New Hampshire has raised the legal age to buy tobacco to nineteen. Did anyone know they hid this in the budget?

(Correction: Yes, House Rep. Judy Aron’s review of the session that day makes mentions it).

The original legislation, as far as I can tell, was to raise the legal age for smoking to 21. That bill failed. The new “law” raises it to 19 years of age. But if there was no bill during the session for this, your elected officials just created it and added it without a single committee, hearing, or vote. No one knew. And now it’s law.

That appears to be how lawmaking gets done in the Granite State, and it needs to stop.

Author

Steve MacDonald

Steve is a long-time New Hampshire resident, award-winning blogger, and a member of the Board of Directors of The 603 Alliance. He is the owner of Grok Media LLC and the Managing Editor, Executive Editor, assistant editor, Editor, content curator, complaint department, Op-ed editor, gatekeeper (most likely to miss typos because he has no editor), and contributor at GraniteGrok.com. Steve is also a former board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, The Republican Volunteer Coalition, has worked for or with many state and local campaigns and grassroots groups, and is a past contributor to the Franklin Center for Public Policy.

View all posts

X Facebook Telegram