It comes as no surprise: New Yorkers are going to Pennsylvania to by tobacco products. Why? Well, it could have something to do with the recent tax increase. Pennsylvania, essentially, is gaining the tax revenue that New York hoped to generate for itself. The number of cigarette tax stamps New York sold in July fell [...]
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The demand for luxury tobacco has gone way up in recent times and as a result, Pennsylvania is now the only state that has increased the amount of tobacco production through farms by 28% between 2002 and 2007. Meanwhile, in other parts of the nation, southern plantations in particular, production have dropped by 72 percent. [...]
Continue reading about Luxury tobacco from… Central Pennsylvania?!?!
The Texas University Medical Center, as of October 1, 2010, will no longer hire applicants who use tobacco products. That was not a typo. A memo had gone out announcing the policy stating that “associates who are current smokers will be grandfathered with regards to employment, but we encourage them to kick the habit. and [...]
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Okay, it’s been at least a decade since you’ve dusted off Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” (1994 for me), but you see its content every day. Veblen wrote of a leisure class that rocked because it actually had some extra time it could use to screw off – think about how you [...]
Our Friends to the north in Ontario are running into trouble with their reserves refusing to enforce the tobacco laws put in place by government agencies … the same laws that make it illegal the sell tobacco and tobacco-related products to minors. Ontario’s health promotion minister, Margaret Best, is being called upon to fight and [...]
Continue reading about Enforcing Laws on Reserves, Easier Said than Done
The tobacco harvest for the cigar industry fell 14 percent relative to 2009, signaling that Cuba felt the troubling economic conditions that affected the world last year. In Pinar del Rio, where the most famous tobacco in Cuba is grown, 22.4 million leaves were harvested this year, down from 26 million in 2009. A local [...]
Continue reading about Capitalism Trumps Communism: Cuban Cigar Market Spanked by Recession
Smoking cessation company consultants are on a federal advisory committee for tobacco product safety. Nuts? Yeah, that’s an understatement. It isn’t often that an ethics organization (or anyone else for that matter) will come out and say that tobacco manufacturers are getting screwed, so Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in [...]
Continue reading about Conflicts of Interest Infecting FDA Tobacco Committee
So, what do you get the father who has everything? Cigar knowledge. In addition to the sticks you usually pick up for dad, add a copy of The Tobacconist Handbook: The Essential Guide to Cigars & Pipes, by Jorge Armenteros, founder of Tobacconist University.
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The “live free or die” folks have been able to dodge a tax on cigars. The proposed measure, which passed on Wednesday, includes spending cuts borrowing and the possibility of state land sales. Smokeless tobacco products did get swept up in the bill, but cigar smokers, including the guys who cut and light at Two [...]
It’s not often a tax loophole cuts in our favor, and even this occasional win is enough to send the anti-smoking community into orbit. There’s one such “loophole” in President Obama’s children’s health insurance program that provides $250 million in relief to people who consume loose tobacco. It was a twist of marketing, which merely [...]
