Posted on 07/31/2002 7:51:30 PM PDT by RCW2001
Internet Smoke Shops Lure Tax-Averse Cigarette Buyers
By HARLAN SPECTOR
c.2002 Newhouse News Service
As state after cash-strapped state slaps hefty tax increases on cigarettes, smokers are flocking to Internet sites where they can buy tax-free.
Hundreds of Internet smoke shops have come online in recent years, offering a vast selection of premium and discount brands and the enticement of tax-free smoking.
Anti-tobacco activists complain that Internet vendors are unregulated, making it easy for kids to buy online.
Meanwhile, some states are looking for ways to collect the excise taxes cigarette smokers are dodging. Massachusetts and other states have sought customer names from Internet vendors, but they have little leverage to force the issue.
The Ohio Department of Taxation asks a handful of out-of-state vendors for customer lists every year.
"We haven't had very good response," says department spokesman Gary Gudmundson.
"None of these (vendors) report," says Gary Kirschner, chief executive of eSmokes.com. Kirschner says his Internet smoke shop now has 450 competitors online, compared with 30 when his company started in 1999.
"Eighty percent are Indian reservations," he says. "They never report anything to anybody." Sales of cigarettes on Indian reservations are exempt from state and local taxes by law.
Demand is greatest from high-tax states like New York and New Jersey, which levy the nation's highest smoking tax -- $1.50 per pack.
Kirschner says eSmokes also is seeing a jump in customers from Pennsylvania, which raised its tax to $1 a pack on July 15.
New York tried to outlaw Internet and mail-order cigarette sales, but a federal judge struck down the provision last year.
Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., is drafting legislation in Congress to prohibit Internet sales to minors and require that cyberstores be licensed in every state in which they do business.
Age verification at dirtcheapcig.com is typical of Web vendors: "Click here to enter only if your (sic) are 18 or older".
Dr. Rob Crane, a Columbus, Ohio, family physician and anti-smoking activist, says Internet sales threaten efforts to reduce smoking rates with higher taxes.
"It ought to be illegal to sell across state borders," says Crane, who is also part of a campaign to raise the smoking age to 21.
The 55-cent-per-pack tax in his state, where adult and teen smoking rates are among the highest in the nation, may not be enough to drive large numbers of smokers to Internet vendors. Shipping charges keep Internet prices in the ballpark with brick-and-mortar retailers.
Tobacco dealers dispute evidence that higher taxes discourage smoking. They say the tax burden only shifts dependence to low-cost brands and out-of-state vendors.
"It's not people giving up the habit," says Joshua Sanders of the Ohio Council of Retail Merchants.
"They're just going somewhere else."
(Harlan Spector is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. He can be contacted at hspector@plaind.com.)
I do too!! And I love it when he said:
"Until you make it illegal, get out of here."
LOL
Apprently your age can only be determined by carbon dating.
A new study, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, found no statistically significant risk to secondhand smoke. The tobacco industry accused the study's sponsors, the World Health Organization, of trying to suppress the findings; WHO said the companies "completely misrepresented" the study
I think the final report came out a couple of years later, and from that we learned WHO was not telling the truth...
no pun intended
oooopps! I guess can I remember them going from 30 to 35 cents a pack (in the machines outside gas stations where us kids could buy'em) but that was about 1960. Apparently all this smoke in the air has fossilized my thinking apparatus.
That would make cents. I was in Illinois.
Actually, according to most information - smokers OVER estimate, rather than underestimate the risks involved in their habit.
A lot of smokers don't like to hear these facts, and I don't blame them.
I didn't realize that edtimates of increased risks were known as facts. The reason most smokers don't like hearing all of this is because we are sick and tired of it. and we know that most of it is over exageration, or as you say in the case of second hand smoke - it's a scam.
Unfortunately your average person has no idea of the significance, or lack thereof, of the terms used about all of this. Epidemiology and statistics are not exact science and the numbers determined for risks using either science can, and are, manipulated anyway the antis want them to be.
Remember, figures don't lie, but liars figure!!!!
The ones I have the most fun with are the ones that start the stomping and hollering at just the sight of an UNLIT cigarette.
Talk about brainwashed..........SHEESH
And a date :)
I've come to the conclusion there are 3 types of smokers:
1. Non-smokers
2. Smokers
3. Anti-smokers.
#3 being the most militant of course; usually from the same crowd that screams for tolerance!
Maybe it's time to pass an extra tax on being a whiner. Let's call it a HALO tax (for those in the class of human beings "superior" to the smokers). After all, socialism is supposed to be "FAIR!!!!"
/rant
That's why were I to buy online, I would go thru the international place. I didnt know that the domestic sellers have a choice in following federal law?
Awe, we still luv yah here Jenny. :)
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