Smoking ban at beach bad for local businesses

Something I find to be several times more disgusting than cigarette butts left at the beach is Susan Kepner's efforts to try and ban smoking completely at the beach with her possible bill. I'm a non-smoker and believe a bill such as the one she is drafting would drastically kill tourism at the beach and hurt small businesses and treats people who smoke as lesser human beings.

This is the Live Free or Die state and legislators such as herself are trying to take away the citizens' personal liberties. Not every smoker is leaving their cigarette butts behind, so it would be insolent of us to punish all smokers for what a small fraction of them decide to do. Additionally, non-smokers leave plenty of trash behind at the beach and yet we don't see any lawmakers trying to place a ban on bringing plastic bottles or paper onto the beach, which take just as long as cigarette filters to decompose.

I believe this bill would ultimately discourage a large portion of tourists from coming to Hampton Beach, which would contribute to a large drop in revenue for our small businesses who create jobs and fuel our community's economy. Maybe instead of banning smoking completely, we could work on ways to make cigarettes easier to dispose of, such as positioning proper cigarette disposal units across our state parks. We can all agree that littering is a huge problem on our state beaches, but an outright ban of smoking is not the right way to go about solving such a problem.