BELCHERTOWN — The town’s Board of Health will vote to draft a generational nicotine sales ban on Wednesday, preventing anyone born after Jan 1, 2004 from ever purchasing tobacco products in town.

Board members, along with Director of Public Health Andrea Crete, presented the proposed revision to Belchertown’s tobacco sales regulations at the Select Board’s Monday evening meeting.

The regulation would initially apply to an age demographic that is too young to legally purchase tobacco in Massachusetts, when most tobacco users report to have started smoking. However, if enacted, anyone born after 2003 would continue to be prohibited from buying nicotine products permanently within the town’s borders, hopefully phasing out the sale of nicotine completely.

“Ninety percent of adults that smoke started before the age of 18. It’s a childhood choice. It is adult addiction,” said Kris Hoag, director of Belchertown Public Schools Drug Free Communities Program.

However, Select Board members were not convinced of the ban’s efficacy and raised concerns about its impact on local businesses. Member Nicole Miner said she’s received hundreds of emails over the past week from residents, Massachusetts citizens and small business owners asking her to object to the initiative. She said that barring legal adults from buying nicotine products is too restrictive.

While member Lesa Lessard Pearson said she understands where the health board is coming from, the ban doesn’t prevent Belchertown youth from finding nicotine outside of town lines.

“You can’t legislate behavior,” Pearson said. “What I’m interested in is educating people about the dangers of this drug and doing the best we can to steer young people away from smoking. I don’t have confidence that this does much more than set out a lofty ideal.”

If the Board of Health approves an amended draft of tobacco regulations that includes the nicotine-free generation rules, a public hearing will take place to gather public input on them before the board votes on a final draft. Crete said the new tobacco regulations will need approval by the health board before the end of the year for the updated tobacco sale regulations to be in effect beginning on Jan. 1, 2025.

Dr. Anthony Ishak, co-petitioner for Brookline’s generational tobacco ban, explained that the initiative originated as a way to combat new nicotine products that target teens. He used the example of the vaping epidemic among teens in the 2010s. Hoag and Board of Health Member Kenneth Elstein added that this regulation will grandfather in adult smokers while preventing new smokers.

Crete also noted that the generational tobacco ban is structured to give retailers a long window to pivot to find new merchandise to sell in lieu of nicotine products. Miner and Pearson asked if anyone had data on how stricter tobacco regulations impact small business sales, but the data was not on hand.

“Basically what we’re doing is we’re telling adults who could enter into the military tomorrow, go to war and get killed, that they can’t walk into a store in Belchertown and buy tobacco,” Miner said. “I don’t think that a small subset of people should have the right to make that decision for people in that situation.”

The Select Board asked if the Board of Health would be willing to put the question on a ballot or bring it to Town Meeting, but Chair LeeAnne Connolly said this regulation is within the powers of the Board of Health and has to be treated as such.

“We’ve got to treat this as any regulation that the Board of Health enforces. We’ve never gone to Town Meeting in the past to get a vote, so I don’t see why we should treat this regulation or this proposal any differently,” she said.

Nine towns in the commonwealth have adopted tobacco-free generation regulations, with eight of those towns agreeing to it this year, and Brookline adopting it in 2020. Northampton and Montague are also considering the same initiative to potentially be in effect by the beginning of next year.