Marlboro cigarettes news

Thanks to a state law that went into effect last week, it is illegal for New Yorkers to receive cigarettes delivered to their home or place of business. In legal terms, the law is a violation of the constitutional clause that protects interstate commerce.
In layman's terms, it's a ripoff.
The law means that hardworking United Parcel Service drivers can be arrested if they're caught delivering cigarettes. And you as a consumer could get nailed, too, since signing for those smokes is a class E felony.
Yes, smoking is unhealthy. But it is legal. And, according to the Online Tobacco Retailers Association, about 25% of adults in the United States smoke 10 or more cigarettes a day. Many of them are low-income or disabled people who turn to Internet retailers for convenience and cost savings.
Legislators described their new law as a measure to prevent children from getting cigarettes through the Internet. But are kids really buying tobacco online?
The evidence says no.

Most Internet tobacco retailing sites use software filters to keep kids out. The purchase of cigarettes online requires a credit card, which the majority of children don't have. Even credit card-sporting juveniles are stymied by the Internet retailers' partnership with credit card companies, which can determine the age of the user.
Shippers, including UPS and the Postal Service, require that an adult sign for deliveries. For the Postal Service, the adult who placed the order must sign for the product. Purchasing cigarettes online presents far more formidable hurdles than buying at the corner convenience store.
So if children's access to cigarettes online isn't a huge problem, why has New York made online purchases illegal? Quite simply, it needs your money.
To help bridge whopping budget gaps, the city and state have sent cigarette taxes through the ceiling. The state charges $15 in excise taxes per carton, and the city another $15. Kentucky, to cite one comparison, charges 30 cents a carton.

But the taxes have had the reverse effect of reducing revenues by cutting sales. Since Mayor Bloomberg enacted his tax, cigarette sales in New York City have dropped about 50%. Did half of smokers quit? Of course not. They simply went online and had their cigarettes delivered. Is this tax avoidance? Well, yes, but avoidance - as distinct from evasion - is legal, and it goes on all the time.
For Father's Day, for example, I bought a gift for my dad in New Jersey because it doesn't charge sales tax on clothing. And for the daughter of a friend, I recently bought a doll online from a store in Chicago. I didn't pay sales tax because the store doesn't have a presence in New York.
The state has a line on its tax form for reporting such online purchases, including cigarettes, so it can collect the sales tax. Obviously, that's a hard way to raise revenue, but it is the proper way to go. The state should not selectively ban one product - tobacco - from online purchases while permitting everything else.
The Constitution protects interstate commerce. Why should New York be the only state in the union that's exempt?