I am here in New York and besides smuggling there is another way. I am not sure of the details but I think pipe tobacco is not taxed at the same rate as cigarette tobacco. A carton costs about 80 to 90 bucks of brand name butts. There are two places around me that sell cartons for 40 bucks. You pick your tobacco and they load it into a rolling machine and you sit there and place them in a carton. The cigarettes don’t seem to have all the chemicals of brand names but they are just as good and it’s pure tobacco, sort of healthy free range smokes at half the cost.
The large Rolling Machines are now illegal since 2013...when the tobacco company’s fought owners of these machines since so many people were changing over from store bought brands..... The tobacco industry claimed the businesses who had these machines were ‘manufacturing’ cigarettes....Tobacco Comany’s won the case and all these machines have been removed or stored from these businesses.
You can still buy the roll your own machines, but businesses that roll them for you are now illegal.
A couple of people at work roll their own now, using pipe tobacco, and say it costs them about $20 for the tobacco.... which includes the tube costs....gives them ‘3 plus cartoons’. Saving thousands a year they said.
They both claim the first thing they noticed was they stopped coughing mornings....supposedly because there are no chemicals in the tobacco they use.