Cigarette taxes in New York City (this is combined city and state tax) are at $5.85 per pack.
This has led folks to find clever ways around the system: mail order cigarettes, until the government cracked down on that, sales of single smokes, cigarette smuggling…and now, roll your own cigarette shops.
Jonathan Behrins, a lawyer for the companies that own the shops, said Monday that the stores were not obligated to charge cigarette taxes because “we are not producing cigarettes for resale.”
“We are selling the contents that produce the cigarette,” he said, “and it’s up to the user to make them.”
I’m sure it comes as no great shock to anyone that the city disagrees, and is suing the shops in federal court.
“By selling illegally low-priced cigarettes,” said the city’s lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, “defendants not only interfere with the collection of city cigarette taxes, they also impair the city’s smoking cessation programs and impair individual efforts at smoking reduction, thereby imposing higher health care costs on the city and injuring public health.”
Awwwwww. I feel bad for the Bloomberg administration. No, wait, that’s still heartburn. Never mind.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 7:22 am and is filed under Clippings, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Sounds to me like the easier answer is to just tax tobacco, rather than the finished product
“A year from now, 10, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people . . . better. And I do not hold to that.”