Tobacco.org

Dan Walters: Smoking is a bad habit, but so is basing budget on a tax gimmick 

It's inherently wrong to tax a commodity that's otherwise legal with the express goal of making it so expensive that people will stop buying it, particularly something that less than 20 percent of the adult population uses. It's nannyism, treating law-abiding adults as if they were children who must be coerced to stop doing something that the politicians don't happen to like. While smoking is this season's targeted bad habit, what's to prevent others from being singled out for death-by-taxes? . .

There's already a substantial traffic in untaxed cigarettes in the state, and adding another $20-plus to the price of a carton would make the bootleg profit potential enormous. The traffic in illegal drugs already supports a criminal subculture -- both wars between rival drug dealers and crimes committed to support drug habits. Russian gangs have established a trade in hijacked and untaxed gasoline in Southern California. Are we prepared for the outbreak of bootleg cigarette wars?

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