Cheap cigarettes line
Smokers are taking up the old ritual of hand-rolling
cigarettes and the new practices of e-commerce to get around Pennsylvania's
month-old cigarette tax increase.State officials fear the two options
one legitimate, one questionable could shave millions of dollars cheap
cigarettes online from state tobacco tax revenue.
But Jennifer Davis just wants to save a few bucks.''I'm addicted, I
can't quit, so I might as well do it cheap,'' said Davis, 23, of Lancaster
County, who has been smoking for eight years.
Standing in front of a wall of rolling tobacco, papers and rolling machines in the Tobacco Shoppe in Lancaster, Davis lamented, ''I've never rolled a cigarette before in my life. But even cheap cigarettes online generics cost more than $3 a pack now, and I'm not about to drive to Delaware every time I want a cigarette.''Pennsylvania tripled its cigarettes tax last month to $1 per pack to help balance the state budget.But the tax doesn't cover rolling tobacco. And a carton's worth of cigarettes can be rolled for about $15 less than half the price of factory-rolled smokes.''We're bringing back old stuff that's never sold before,'' said Mike Cramsey, a buyer cheap cigarettes online for T & B Cramsey Wholesale, a tobacco shop in Allentown. He said the store has seen a big increase in sales of rolling tobacco and related products, such as rolling machines and papers that until recently he couldn't get rid of.
''It took us all by surprise,'' said Jan Morgan, Tobacco Category manager for Uni-Mart Corp., which owns more than 50 Choice Cigarette Discount Outlet stores in Pennsylvania. Rolling-tobacco sales have tripled for the stores.''We can't keep it in stock,'' said Dennis Zehner Sr., an employee at Tobacco and Cigar Connoisseurs in Allentown, cheap cigarettes online where sales of rolling tobacco have gone up threefold. ''We get a shipment in one day, and the next day it's gone.''Republic Tobacco, maker of the popular Drum and Top brands of tobacco, has expanded production facilities because of new demand brought about by increased taxes in 17 states this year, said Warren Schoening, the company's national cheap cigarettes online sales manager.
Internet tobacco sales have skyrocketed alongside states' cigarette taxes. Smokers can easily find a carton of Marlboro going for less than $32 online that's 25 percent less than traditional sales.The price includes shipping. In most cases, Web sites can offer such low prices because, unlike other retailers, they don't have to collect taxes.When buying cartons through the Internet, people are supposed to pay the taxes directly to the state.To make sure that happens, online retailers are required cheap cigarettes online to send the customer's name, address and purchase amount to the state Department of Revenue.It rarely happens that way at the hundreds of Web sites dealing in cheap smokes, state officials say.Senecasmokes.com boasts that it ''does not report to any state taxation or cheap cigarettes online tobacco department.''
The practice is hard to trace, harder to prosecute and costs states billions of dollars in lost revenue.A report by the General Accounting Office, Congress' research arm, predicts cheap cigarettes online revenue from Internet cigarette sales will reach $5 billion by 2005, costing states about $1.4 billion in lost revenue.It's too soon for state officials to say, in dollars, how much Internet sales will swipe from tax revenue.Anthony Beccone, director of Pennsylvania's Office of Criminal Tax Investigation, said his department is trying to head off the problem. Agents in Beccone's department are sending letters to about 500 Internet vendors, notifying them they must report their transactions in the state.Making them follow the rules is the tough part, Beccone said.The Cigarette Tax Enforcement unit has a staff of six, and the U.S. mail makes a convenient hiding place for transactions, he cheap cigarettes online said.If the violating vendor is in another state, the crime becomes a federal matter. But federal agencies have more pressing business, said Jim Crandall, a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spokesman.
''We're not as active as we would cheap cigarettes online be if it were a felony,'' Crandall said. ''U.S. attorneys aren't looking to prosecute this. They have more traditionally evil criminals to worry about.''