Can we still roll our own?
 

New York sues "roll your own" cigarette shops

By Chris Francescani
NEW YORK | Mon Nov 21, 2011 5:54pm EST
(Reuters) - New York City sued the city's first "roll-your-own" cigarette business on Monday in its latest attempt to reduce smoking rates and retain revenue from the highest combined city and state tobacco tax in the nation.

City attorneys said that Island Smokes, which has storefronts in Manhattan and Staten Island with plans to expand to all five boroughs, was manufacturing cigarettes without paying city taxes.

Patrons of the business make their own smokes one by one, paying a fraction of the price of store-bought city cigarettes. The loose tobacco used at the shops is taxed at significantly lower rates than manufactured tobacco.

Customers of Island Smokes sit on bar stools and use individual machines that squirt the tobacco into a hollow paper-and-filter ensemble.

They pay about $4.50 per pack if they make one pack of cigarettes; the price drops to $3 a pack if they make an entire carton of 10 packs. By comparison, a pack of 20 cigarettes averages $12 to $13 in the city and can be as high as $15.

The company said they were simply facilitating the ability for customers to make their own cigarettes efficiently. The city disagreed.

"They are trying to get around the law by claiming they're not in the business of selling cigarettes when they clearly are," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement, adding the lower prices Island Smokes offers creates an unfair advantage over business owners who pay commercial tobacco taxes.

Since the city started raising cigarette taxes and expanding public health campaigns in 2002 under the Bloomberg administration, there has been a 35 percent drop in smoking rates, according to the New York City Department of Health, to 14 percent from 22 percent of New Yorkers in 2002.

But the higher taxes have also given rise to a lucrative underground market in contraband cigarettes.

Jonathan Behrins, a lawyer for Island Smokes, called the city's lawsuit more symbolic than effectual.

"That's what I resent about this whole thing ... they're trying to paint us with the same brush of smugglers and counterfeiters."

"It eludes me why they are going after, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians," Behrins said, referring to the fictional race of tiny people in "Gulliver's Travels."

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Cynthia Johnston)

Fk NYC

I swore off machine-rolled smokes several months ago and I will stick to that. Smoking is bad and I hope to get the upper hand on that soon but in the meantime, I am happy rolling them up. Nevermind how I learned that skill.

I also think I am avoiding a bunch of chemicals that are absent from bulk tobacco. And......I have to really want a smoke before I'll take the trouble. It's not a casual decision now.

LA County has something like $80 Million in "First 5" cig taxes that they can't figure out how to spend, and can't account for millions. "First 5" is a cig tax to pay for fetal and new born child care in CA. So if you smoke here, you actually contribute more to fetal and child care than non-smokers. With $12-$13 tax per pack in NYC, internet purchases must be very good.

Can you roll/make your own chew? or just chuck it in??

That's a really odd way to phrase it. We all know that state governments make a considerable sum in revenue from cigarette tax. I've heard that tax revenue actually exceeds what the cigarette companies make from selling tobacco.

So if NYC is making this move to protect its revenue stream from roll-your-own operations, why would they threaten that revenue stream at the same time by working to reduce smoking? That makes no sense.

I wish that our governments would just admit that tax revenue is their single biggest motivating factor instead of trying to pretend otherwise.

The cancer you get from "roll your own" isn't as good as the real thing.

This is what galls me is this, if the law makers wanted to address the roll your own crowd, they should have put that into their tax code in the first place.

[edit] This is too little, too late IMO. They are suing? Ahhhhh!

I rolled my own in the mid '70's when I was too broke to afford store-bought. I think a can of Top was a dollar, it made about a carton. And people who would normally bum cigaretts from me wouldn't take 'em, they'd look for someone else to bum from.
Jim