[RussianConservative]

Lung Cancer is serious illness and so is TB and cigarettes contribute or cause to both. This is not to tax on cigarettes to finance some program, like US sinning taxes, this is to cause flat out drop in smoking.

[Mears]

Raising the price won't cause smoking to drop,education and social preassure MAY do it,but if a smoker wants to smoke,he or she will smoke.

Raising the price causes the seeking of cheaper alternatives.

[struwwelpeter]

Taxing cheap, NON-filtered cigarettes while excusing the higher-costing filtered and imported ones sounds more like Bill Gates than Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Some deputat took major money to gore this ox.

BTW: What to smokes cost in your neck of the woods? Here are some of our Ukrainian prices:

Belomorkanal .39 /pack (7 cents)
Kozak brand .50 / pack (9 cents)
Prima (Russian imported) .65 (12 cents)
Tu-134 (Russian) 10 pack carton 7.50 ($1.40)
Rothman's (British) 47.70 / carton ($8.90)
Camel 24.00 / carton ($4.48)
Winston 21.90 / carton ($4.09)
Marlboro 30.90 / carton ($5.77)

[The Libertarian Dude]

Just wait and watch... there will be a HUGE jump in bootleg smokes. It's happened here, it'll happen in Russia.

This is what happens when governments try to tax things into oblivion... the black market rears its ugly head. Cause and effect, cause and effect... Pavlov would be proud.

[Gabz]

TB is an infectious disease and is NOT caused, by any stretch of the imagination, by cigarettes. In fact cigarettes don't cause anything, smoking them may increase the risk of contracting some diseases, but cigarettes are inanimate objects. About the only thing a cigarette causes is instant hysteria in the anti-smokers.

Several years ago a friend of ours contracted TB and we all had to be tested. My husband tested positive.....subsequent testing showed that he had been exposed to TB some years earlier, but his own immune system had fought it off...........My husband is a smoker.

Of the entire group of us that had to be tested only one other person tested positive - the person who had it - and he is the only non-smoker of the group.