New York now has the highest cigarette tax in the country after the state legislature in Albany on Monday passed a bill that adds another $1.60 in state taxes to every cigarette pack sold starting July 1. The new tax will bring the average price for a pack of smokes in the Empire State to $9.20 and almost $11 in New York City, the New York Times reported. The tax hike comes as part of an effort to close the state’s $9.2 billion defecit, which is threatening to temporarily shut down state services. In October, Connecticut raised its cigarette tax from $1 to $3 per pack, bringing the cost of cigarettes to just under $8 per pack. Large cigarette companies claim publicly that higher cigarette taxes do not reduce adult and youth smoking, but execs at these firms have fretted among themselves behind closed doors that they do indeed correlate to lower cigarette sales, according to Washington, D.C.-based tobaccofreekids.org. A recent study from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA suggests that increasing cigarette taxes could be an effective way to reduce smoking among individuals with alcohol, drug or mental disorders. The study, published online in the American Journal of Public Health, found that a 10 percent increase in cigarette pricing resulted in an 18.2 percent decline in smoking among people in these groups. Researchers based their work on data from 7,530 individuals from the 2000–01 Healthcare for Communities Household Survey. As a business writer who smoked about a pack a day for 15 years until July 2006, this may be one of a few scenarios that I can think of — perhaps the only one — where I actually applaud higher taxes and lower sales — in a single breath, no less.
