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New York City is now the most expensive place in the U.S. to buy cigarettes thanks to a new price hike Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law Monday. The Associated Press (AP) reports that the new legislation includes a price hike that would raise the price of a pack of cigarettes to $13 a pack and restrictions on the number of places allowed to sell cigarettes.

Mayor de Blasio signed a sweeping series of anti-smoking bills Monday as part of a comprehensive effort to help reduce the number of smokers in the city by nearly 200,000 over the next few years. Nearly a million of people in the city still smoke, despite steady declines in smoking rates between 2002 and 2015, according to the health department. Speaking on Monday, de Blasio said he'd seen first-hand the impact smoking had on a family.

This is posted under vanity Please anyone who smokes please stop I have had health problems associated with smoking and cost a lot of money. Almost lost my left arm

Government cracks down on tobacco but there is better way to cut health-care costs The federal government has announced plans to reduce the amount of nicotine in cigarettes in a completely untested attempt to reduce smoking, but this approach will take many years to even be put into effect, and such an approach ignores many other proven techniques which will work more quickly, and could slash health-care costs now, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf. Banzhaf has been called “The Man Behind the Ban on Cigarette Commercials,” “The Law Professor Who Masterminded Litigation Against the Tobacco Industry,” and “a...

A new study shows a connection between cigarette taxes and food stamps. When cigarette taxes go up, smokers end up spending more of their income on cigarettes and that leaves less money for food. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: We have news of an unintended effect of sin taxes - you know, taxes on alcohol or cigarettes. Lawmakers reluctant to raise any other taxes do raise those, which seems so worthy - discouraging bad habits or doing something else. NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam is here. Hi, Shankar. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, Steve. INSKEEP: What happens instead in some cases? VEDANTAM:...

" ... The national smoking rate has fallen to historic lows, with just 15 percent of adults still smoking. But the socioeconomic gap has never been bigger. ..." "... Among the nation’s less-educated people — those with a high-school-equivalency diploma — the smoking rate remains more than 40 percent ..."

Starting July 1, California’s tax rate for other tobacco products (OTP), including cigars, will increase from 27.3 to 65.08. The reason for this massive increase is Proposition 56, a ballot measure which passed overwhelmingly in November that increased the state’s tax on cigarettes from 87 cents to $2.87. California taxes other tobacco products by dividing the tax rate per cigarette by the average wholesale cost per cigarette, that number is then the OTP tax. Since 2011, this has generally stayed around 30 percent, but because of the massive cigarette tax increase, the OTP tax has more than doubled. Consumers are...

TUNKHANNOCK — A woman accused of dousing someone with gasoline during a fight at a gas station in Wyoming County has been sent to prison. Kimberly Brinton was sentenced to two to six years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to risking a catastrophe and drug charges from a separate incident.

Smoking was banned in New York's restaurants, bars and clubs in 2003, but that didn't stop a host of celebrity smokers from sparking up inside the Met Gala. Stars including Bella Hadid, Dakota Johnson and Frances Bean Cobain threw caution to the wind as they rebelliously lit up indoors while taking a break from the circus of the evening's fashionable festivities.

Back in December we looked at one of the final “midnight regulations” handed down from the Obama administration which sought to ban smoking tobacco products in government housing units. That was a complicated case to be sure, but Susan Shapiro brings up an even stranger story at the Washington Post this week. Shapiro is a former smoker herself (who is to be congratulated for having kicked the habit fifteen years ago) and lives in a privately owned co-op which is considering banning smokers and even giving the boot to people who already own a unit there if they smoke. The...

ALBANY — Thanks to the new state budget, electronic cigarette users can puff away without the tax man taking a drag. Despite an alarming surge in e-cigarette use by high school students, state lawmakers — at the urging of the GOP-controlled Senate — rejected Gov. Cuomo’s plan to tax the liquid used in the devices and tighten restrictions on their use, advocates charged Monday. Cuomo’s proposals were mysteriously left out of the budget approved by the Senate and Assembly over the weekend. “The Senate Republicans picked big tobacco over public health,” said Bill Sherman, vice president for government relations at...

I started smoking in 1971; bought 3 packs of Camels one day (unfiltered) for a total of 99 cents plus tax. But now, 46 years later, I no longer use tobacco. You see, seven years ago I switched to Electronic Cigarettes. Just pour in a little nicotine liquid mixed with vegetable oil—your choice of potency—and you’re all set to “vape” away. No lung-threatening, tarry chemicals. No smelly, annoying smoke to attract nasty looks. In fact, the “discharge” from these pricey little, battery-driven machines can be blown around your doctor’s consulting room and neither he nor his staff will be any...

Growing up can be confusing, especially if you're a kid in Oregon. You can't drive a car until 16. You can't leave home until 18. And if a new bill passes the state legislature, you can't pick up a pack of cigarettes until 21. But Oregon offers one state perk long before any of those other milestones. With or without parental permission, the state subsidizes gender reassignment surgery starting at age 15. To reiterate, kids can change their sex with help from the taxpayer, but soon many adults won't be able to buy smokes. The pending legislation perfectly demonstrates the...

So What Happened to Wiretapping "Smoking Gun"? Didn't Nunes say that the NSA would be releasing info on Friday?

For the past several decades, governments have been cracking down on tobacco consumption, including by banning smoking in many places such as bars or restaurants. But we've learned a lot about the effects of these kinds of policies over the last few years and now it's time to reconsider them. Here's why: 1. Property Rights Most fundamentally, the debate about smoking bans should center on private property rights. Whether you should be allowed to smoke in a bar should be determined by the owner of that bar, not by busybody bureaucrats who think they know how to live everyone’s lives...

A recent decision of the Hawaii Labor Relations Board (HLRB) has some people wondering if the United Public Workers (UPW), one of the government employee unions, has figured out how to ignore the law. Earlier this year, our lawmakers passed Act 25. It bans smoking on the premises of our state-owned hospitals. The law, which is trying to protect not only workers but also visitors and patients, says specifically that it is not subject to collective bargaining, and that hospital administrators are required to “prominently display signs stating that ‘tobacco and electronic smoking device use is prohibited’” at all entrances...

April Simpson has been living in the Queensbridge Houses, a public housing development in Queens, New York, her whole life. “From day one. I was born here,” she says, proudly. When she walks among the iconic six-story, red-brick buildings, passersby say hi to her and kiss her on the cheek. Everyone seems to know her. Simpson, a charismatic 54-year-old with buzzed short hair and a broad smile, is the Queensbridge tenants’ association president. She’s also a smoker. But come 2017, under a new federal rule, she won’t be allowed to light up one of her Newport cigarettes inside the housing...

The policy will be viewed as punitive and cruel and noncompliance will be widespread. It is incredibly foolish and unkind. The U.S. Department of Homewrecking and Utopian Development (HUD) said it plans to forbid smoking in public housing units to protect millions of low-income tenants from the ridiculously over-hyped effects of secondhand tobacco smoke. The ban will affect more than 940,000 units of housing subsidized by federal taxpayers. “Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, healthy home free from harmful second-hand cigarette smoke,” head HUD honcho Julián Castro said in a statement.

For the first time since 1999, California has raised the taxes on cigarettes—and thanks to an interesting provision in the state laws, the state’s taxes on cigars are also going up. Just before midnight local time, the Associated Press called the decision on Proposition 56, a ballot measure that asked California voters whether to raise the tax on cigarettes from 87 cents to $2.87 per pack. California voters overwhelmingly said yes. Taxes on cigars will also be going up substantially. California adjusts taxes on other tobacco products, including cigars, every year. The state’s Board of Equalization determines the rate by...

LONDON — British American Tobacco has offered to buy out Reynolds American Inc. for $47 billion in an attempt to gain a strong presence in the U.S., a lucrative market where sales of electronic cigarettes are booming as traditional smoking fades. The takeover would create the world's largest publicly traded tobacco company and combine BAT's presence in developing countries, where anti-smoking campaigns are not as strong as in the U.S. and Europe, with Reynolds' almost exclusive focus on the U.S. BAT already owns 42 percent of Reynolds and sells Dunhill, Rothmans and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Reynolds controls about a third...