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ROTTERDAM
Health chief urges grocers to stop selling cigarettes
Industry leader warns of ‘slippery slope’
BY JAMES SCHLETT Gazette Reporter

    Supermarkets throughout New York found themselves being publicly spanked Wednesday by the state health commissioner, who urged them to pull tobacco products from their shelves.
    The Health Department and a host of consumer health advocacy groups ran separate full-page ads in several upstate newspapers, nudging grocers to “put public health before profits by kicking butts.”
    While the supermarket industry spokespersons are used to such public critiques from advocacy groups, they were shocked to find Health Commissioner Dr. Richard Daines joining the anti-tobacco chorus.
    “This is using our bully pulpit to persuade,” Daines said in a phone interview with The Daily Gazette.
    The ads, which appeared locally in The Daily Gazette and the Times Union, mark a strategy shift for the Health Department. The agency also issued a news release in which Daines criticized supermarkets’ sale of cigarettes.
    The Health Department, which Daines took over last year, has been stepping up its anti-tobacco initia- tives. In recent months, Daines has urged movie studios to not include cigarettes in films geared toward teenagers. He also asked the Food and Drug Administration to allow New York convenience stores to sell nicotine replacement items at a lower price.
    Daines wants to reduce the state’s ranks of smokers — now 2.7 million strong — by 1 million by 2010.
    Daines said the $1.25 cigarette tax hike lawmakers have included in the state budget should prompt 100,000 people to quit smoking. The increase will make New York’s cigarette tax the highest in the nation at $2.75 per pack. But Daines’ latest anti-smoking initiative has its detractors.
    “We’re selling products New York says is legal, and it’s a slippery slope when the government tells you what you should and shouldn’t buy,” said Jim Rogers, the president and chief executive offi cer of the Food Industry Alliance of New York State, an Albany-based trade organization.
    Rogers said it was “curious” the way supermarkets were singled out by the Health Department, which has no regulatory authority over that industry. He said the Health Department was acting “disingenuously and hypocritically,” especially since the agency recently worked with the supermarket industry in training cashiers not to sell tobacco products to minors.
    “We’re encouraging food retailers to not sell this toxic product. I don’t see any hypocrisy to it,” Daines said.
    Judy Rightmyer, director of the Capital District Tobacco-Free Coalition in Troy, said her organization targeted supermarkets in its ad because some upstate grocers have already stopped selling cigarettes. Since January, three supermarket chains have announced plans to stop selling cigarettes: Wegmans Food Markets and Budwey’s Supermarkets in western New York and DeCicco Markets in the Hudson Valley.
    It also seemed more reasonable to target supermarkets because tobacco is not as important to supermarkets as it is to convenience stores, said Rightmyer.
    Mona Golub, a spokeswoman for the Rotterdam-based Price Chopper chain, said the latest anti-tobacco campaign pits the good intentions of some against the legal rights of others. She noted that Price Chopper two months ago started reducing the visibility of cigarettes in supermarkets by covering tobacco product kiosks with opaque sheets.
    In November, the Capital District Tobacco-Free Coalition criticized area supermarkets for exposing children to colorful cigarette displays. Golub said the kiosk sheets address those concerns. The coalition is funded by the Health Department.
    A spokesman for the Scarborough, Maine-based Hannaford supermarket chain did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.

This state will tax anything. It still baffles me how they can increase the tax on cigarettes when at the same time they are sinking money into to abolish the use of it! Smokers and non smokers alike should be outraged. And ya know why? IF people continue to quit smoking and the new generation doesn't take up the habit, who will pay for the programs that are being paid for by this present tax? EVERYONE!!! Either through another taxed item or your property tax.

I mean come on, if they are going to be that stupid, then increase the tax on alcohol while they are at it. We are being taxed out of this state. And let me ask everyone....who got a REFUND from the state this year? And who had to pay state tax in ADDITION to the tax we pay all year?

Yes, this new "tax" will definately force me to buy cigs from "alternative sources" - but it really irks me.

They'll tax cigarettes to death (pardon the pun) - but even in todays paper, DWI, while illegal, still happens - people are still in hospitals, an entire bridge can be shutdown during rush hour (for multiple hours) - yet they WILL NOT put any additional tax on beer/wine/alcohol.   WHY????

Get rid of "happy hour" in the SLA codes - make a bottle of beer $5 - add $10 to a bottle of booze -- never.  Just tax cigarettes.

I understand, cigs smell, cigs are cancer causing - I know the speach.  Alcohol claims lives too. Alcohol causes medical issues not just for the user, but for others he/she may hit, families destroyed, etc. Look at what bars/alcohol are doing to our local tax base - more bars in the arts & drunks district than we can shake  a stick at, yet what real return on our money here in Schenectady?

Both have serious complications - why just tax ONE vice?

New York State is going to run out of things to tax, at this rate. They will start to tax all vices in the future.

And to have this smokefreecapital.org nicely suggest to all private businesses to not sell cigarettes is an infrigment on them. It should be the CHOICE of the private businesses to sell them, with out pressure for outside influences, and the CHOICE of the people to buy them.

When you start allowing the government to take one right away, others will follow.

We've already lost a few of our rights and the government will take more if we let them.

hold on....I just made microwave popcorn.....is there a tax---shhhhh, dont tell them.....

http://www.dailygazette.com

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Don’t make supermarkets quit selling cigarettes

    State Health Commissioner Dr. Richard Daines wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t speak out against smoking once in a while, but we think he overstepped his bounds when he joined the recent statewide ad campaign pressuring supermarkets to stop selling cigarettes.
    The last time we looked, cigarettes were still legal everywhere in this country. The federal and state governments have taken numerous steps over the years to discourage smoking — putting scary warnings on the sides of cigarette packs, banning certain kinds of advertising, severely restricting where smokers can light up, taxing cigarettes to the hilt, etc. The efforts have paid dividends, as more and more smokers have quit, fewer people have started, and nonsmokers have cleaner air to breathe.
    But there should be a limit as to how far government can go in regulating the sale and use of a product it still refuses to outlaw. Eliminating one of the primary places to obtain the product qualifies is just such an example of going too far.
    If smokers couldn’t buy their cigarettes in supermarkets, about the only legal place left for them would be in “convenience” stores. Not very convenient for smokers, and why give these kinds of stores a virtual monopoly?
    Reducing smokers’ legal access to cigarettes might encourage them to go underground — buying on the black market, online or from Indian reservations. (This would, of course, deprive the state of needed tax revenue.) The $1.25-per-pack state tobacco tax hike in this year’s state budget will push them underground to some extent, too.
    It will also encourage thousands to quit smoking, so it is justified. For those who can’t, or still don’t want to, cigarettes shouldn’t be made any harder to obtain, at least not physically.
    Most supermarkets have already made their displays of cigarettes less obtrusive, removing them from checkout aisles and putting them behind service desks, or at least in more-discreet display cases. For now, that should satisfy all but the most ardent smoking foes.

Go ahead and put a tax and/or make them illegal they will end up in the world of pot, cocaine, street viagra and street oxycontin......just like the NYS lottery and gambling industry----NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THAT MONEY COLLECTED,,,,,

ask Ms.Gillibrand if she can guarantee the NYS tax on gas wont go up if Mr.Bush follows her plan......

people----WE HAVE NO STRAW FOR THE BRICKS....SHOW ME THE $$ TRAIL................................................... >

the snake is eating it's tail........

There are quite a few people that I know that are getting their cigarettes from friends and relatives who live in the southern states. And I'm sure that practice will continue to increase.

To repeat the phrase my mom used to say, "You (NYS) will bite your nose to spite your face" You can't fill a budget gap with taxes you won't collect.

It will bring back the days when high taxed items were smuggled in from where the item was cheap just like they did with alcohol and drugs.

Quoted from Shadow

We've already lost a few of our rights and the government will take more if we let them.

We are already letting them. Who, out there will stand up for their rights and stop them? If even they can be stopped.

They dont care about filling a budget gap---that is just smoke being blown up our donkeys(as mobil coined the term)......it is $$ that will go to whatever it will and they direct it to,,,,including pocket linings........

http://www.dailygazette.com

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Higher tobacco taxes spur concern about black market
BY DAVID B. CARUSO The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — Tucked away on just 55 acres in a nondescript Long Island suburb, the Poospatuck Indian Reservation is easy to miss on the long drive up the coast from New York City. But to anyone looking for cheap tobacco, the 60-mile haul is worth the trip.
    Cigarettes are sold tax free on tribal lands in New York, and the savings are eye-popping. Once lawmakers approve the state’s latest hike, crafted last week, smokers will be able to avoid $2.75 in taxes per pack by buying on the reservation. The discount jumps to $4.25 if you factor in the municipal tax added in New York City.
    That huge price difference is one of the reasons why smoke shops on New York’s Indian reservations sold nearly 304 million packs of cigarettes last year — nearly a third of the state’s recorded total.
    The numbers are equally eyepopping when broken down by reservation. The Poospatuck reservation, with a population of about 270, accepted shipment of about 100 million packs of cigarettes last year — enough to supply every smoker in New York City with a pack a day for 3 /2 months, according to the state’s finance department.
    But Indian reservations are far from the only source of tax-free smokes.
CHINESE COUNTERFEITS
    Law enforcement agents say smugglers now routinely use container ships to import counterfeit cigarettes from China. Criminal gangs stock up on cigarettes in lowtax states like Virginia and illegally truck them north. Buyers big and small order an untold number of untaxed cartons on the Internet.
    Some experts are concerned that instances of smuggling, bootlegging and questionable reservation sales will only increase when the tax goes up, and they caution that the problem extends far beyond New York.
    “This is a global problem. It is a national problem,” said Phillip Awe, a chief tobacco law enforcer for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
    Already, from coast to coast, contraband cigarettes are trafficked daily by schemers exploiting differences in tax rates, Awe said, at a cost of “billions and billions of dollars” in lost revenue to the states.
    Traditionally, the illicit cigarette business has flourished in cities with organized crime, but lately there have been incentives for the trade to expand elsewhere.
    Fourteen states have increased tobacco taxes in the past two years, according to the Tobacco Merchants Association, an industry research group.
    Legislation asking for hikes is pending in another 19 states, including a proposed 50-cent increase in South Carolina, where the current 7-cent tax is the nation’s lowest, and New York, which would jump from 16th to 1st by raising its tax from the current $1.50 per pack. The tax increase will bring the cost of a pack of cigarettes to about $9 in New York City.
    Higher taxes could mean the potential for even bigger profits for entrepreneurs who buy cigarettes from untaxed sources and illicitly resell them, said Arthur Katz, executive director of the New York State Association of Wholesale Marketers and Distributors, a group that represents tobacco dealers.
    “You’d have to be crazy to go and buy cigarettes at the store at almost $9 per pack,” Katz said.
    The business is already a big one.
    California officials estimate that taxes go unpaid on about 15 percent of all tobacco sold in its markets, at a cost of $276 million per year. New York put its losses at more than $576 million in a study released in 2006.
    The issue has already prompted some action. The ATF said it is refining its national strategy for combating trafficking in contraband cigarettes and has substantially expanded its investigations, opening up some 700 new cases in the last five years.
    In March 2005, major credit-card companies agreed to stop processing payments from Internet retailers. Shippers DHL and UPS Inc. agreed to stop shipping cigarettes to residential addresses.
    U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., has proposed a bill that would increase the penalties for smuggling, bar the shipment of cigarettes through the U.S. Postal Service, and make it a federal offense for Internet retailers to ignore state tax laws. A hearing on the bill has been scheduled for April 15.
‘GREAT MYSTERY’
    Weiner also called it a “great mystery” why New York hadn’t also cracked down on bulk purchases of cigarettes at Indian reservations by scofflaws who resell them elsewhere. Cigarettes sold on New York’s reservations now routinely turn up for sale in other states and in Canada.
    “You go stand in front of the Shinnecock Reservation on Long Island, in the Hamptons, and you can see people loading boxes and boxes and cases into their trucks,” Weiner said.
    For years in New York, state officials fearing tribal protests have hesitated to enforce an existing law requiring reservation smoke shops to collect taxes from non-Indian buyers.
    They have been especially reluctant to interfere in western New York, where the Seneca Nation, a major distributor of cigarettes, is an economic force in a region that is struggling financially.
    But New York City has gone to court to force the issue; the lawsuit against tobacco wholesalers is pending.
    Law enforcement agencies have at times put reservation smoke shops under surveillance to try and catch outsiders illegally loading up on cigarettes, and over the years there have been dozens of arrests.
    On the Poospatuck Reservation, federal authorities have also charged the owner of the Peace Pipe Smoke Shop, Rodney Morrison, with engaging in a “reign of terror” to protect his multimilliondollar cigarette business.
CASE PENDING
    Prosecutors said Morrison orchestrated the 2003 murder of an associate who opened a competing store, robbed another rival of tens of thousands of dollars, and set fire to the car of a third competitor. Morrison’s lawyers say he is innocent. A jury began deliberating in the case last week.
    Harry Wallace, the owner of a smoke shop on the reservation and the chief of the Unkechaug Nation, is quick to point out that Morrison is not an American Indian by birth; before marrying into the tribe and moving to the reservation, he lived in Brooklyn, where prosecutors said he was once a cocaine dealer.
    “Whatever crimes he’s committed, or not committed, we’re not like he is,” Wallace said. He said the tribe didn’t condone purchases of tobacco on the reservation by anyone who doesn’t intend it for “personal use.”
    As for New York’s expected tax hike, Wallace predicted it would bring nothing but pain to Indian cigarette merchants, and he called it “an absolute certainty” that there will be a pressure for the state to begin taxing reservation sales.
    “We’re going to be scapegoated again as the sole reason why there is all this illegal activity.”

ED BETZ/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS An unidentified man loads cigarettes into a dark plastic bag outside of Peace Pipe Smoke Shop where discount cigarettes are sold in Mastic. The owner of the shop has been charged with murder and other crimes against his competitors.

http://www.timesunion.com

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Smoke signals
First published: Monday, April 7, 2008

Should supermarkets stop selling cigarettes? We think that's a decision for the markets to make. But whether they should decide under pressure of a new anti-smoking advertising campaign is a more complex matter.
It's hard to argue with anti-smoking groups that want supermarkets to voluntarily stop selling cigarettes, as some chains in New York already have. As the state Health Department points out, in an advertisement that appeared in this newspaper and others last week, a pack of smokes hardly belongs among such grocery cart staples as bread, eggs, milk, cheese and broccoli. Tobacco just doesn't fit in. Or at least it shouldn't.
But it is equally hard to argue with the supermarket chains when they say they are caught in the middle of competing interests. Tobacco remains a legal product. As long as it is not sold to minors, why shouldn't supermarkets carry it?
And that's only part of the dilemma. Consider this: Anti-smoking advocates note, correctly, that cigarette advertising and product displays tend to glamorize this unhealthy product, especially in the eyes of youth. But what about other products that are similarly displayed, such as beer? Doesn't alcohol pose a risk to youngsters as much as tobacco? And aren't the consequences of alcohol abuse more immediate than tobacco?
So where to draw the line?
Some supermarkets have taken steps to conceal tobacco products from sight or keep them behind counters, out of customers' reach. That seems like a sensible compromise.
The larger issue, of course, is the mixed signals that New York state sends on smoking. Even as the Health Department was calling on supermarkets to stop selling cigarettes, the Legislature was approving yet another increase in the cigarette tax, which will raise the price of a pack to $7. True, the higher tax is being touted as a way to discourage smoking, which it may well do to some degree. But the more cynical aspect of this tax is that lawmakers need it to help close the state budget deficit of $4.7 billion. Thus, they are counting on smokers, who most often are those with lower incomes, to help balance the books.
The double standard fools no one, including those youngsters who might be curious about smoking. It would be better to send a consistent message against smoking by not relying on tobacco sales and enacting a progressive tax increase, such as the one Assembly Democrats proposed for millionaires. How much better that approach than to target a shrinking constituency that is rapidly losing its say in Albany. ISSUE:A new campaign asks supermarkets to stop selling cigarettes.THE STAKES:The state shouldn't have it both ways on this issue.

Instead of worrying about smoking why don't our legislatures start worrying about how to lower taxes and cut spending so businesses and residents can afford to live in this state.