Black-market cigarettes are costing many states hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost tax revenue. And the lucrative, illicit trade is attracting violent criminal gangs that can be lethally ruthless. The rewards, and the risks, of dealing in contraband cigarettes became quite clear recently in northern Virginia, says Capt. Dennis Wilson of the Fairfax County Police Department.

Undercover investigators working with his department “had two cases where contacts that we were working with had asked us to murder their competition,” Wilson says. “We were able to fake the murder of the individuals.”

The clandestine operation came filled with drama.

“Well, we used some theatrical make up, photographs of the individual on the pavement with blood around the head,” Wilson Says. “That was sufficient for them.”

The investigation resulted in the November 2009 arrest of 14 people tied to the contraband cigarette ring. Investigators say that murder-for-hire is a logical extension of the trade in black-market cigarettes.

Across the nation, organized crime groups with ties to Vietnam, Russia, Korea and China are all competing for a share of the profits, says Edgar Domenech, who leads the Washington, D.C., field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Depending on the quantities of cigarettes that you’re purchasing, you’re talking in the hundreds of thousands to the millions of dollars,” Domenech says. So the stakes are high.

How It Works

Criminals buy cigarettes in bulk, in states with relatively low taxes such as Virginia or North Carolina. They load the cigarettes into tractor-trailers or rented trucks and drive them north, for example, to New York. They follow the same routes they would use to traffic illegal drugs.

Police say a carton that costs less than $40 including tax in a store in Virginia goes for more than $100 in a store in New York City.

“The excise tax for upstate New York is $4.35 cents per pack,” says Brad Maione, of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. “And New York City, I think you add a dollar fifty to that.”

Because of high taxes in the city, selling contraband cigarettes at rates even slightly lower than their value in the store can mean big money for criminals.

New York doesn’t give estimates of how much money it loses each year through the sale of untaxed cigarettes. But California does. “We estimate that about $182 million a year is lost in unpaid excise taxes on cigarettes,” says Anita Gore of the state’s tax collection agency.

Gore says California has invented a new high-tech tax stamp that’s tougher to counterfeit and easier to spot for inspectors who visit stores where tobacco is sold. But often the black-market cigarettes move through a hidden economy.

“They can be sold from … the back of a van on the corner. They can be brought in through big trucks across the border and taken to warehouses and distributed from there,” Gore says.

Easier Than Dealing In Drugs

Investigators say the penalties for trafficking in black-market cigarettes are at most only about five years in prison compared with mandatory sentences for illegal drugs that carry a base line term of five or 10 years behind bars.

Fairfax County’s Wilson says cigarettes are in some cases worth more money to criminals than illegal drugs. Undercover officers, he says, have “even been able to trade large amounts of illicit drugs for the cigarettes.”

For instance, the ATF and Virginia police broke up a smuggling ring last winter where traffickers traded cocaine, thousands of Ecstacy tablets and firearms for nearly 400,000 cartons of cigarettes. The cigarettes were worth more than $8 million on the black market.

Investigators say they expect to see more of those schemes as long as the benefits of trafficking cigarettes outweigh the risks.

From: www.npr.org

Officers stopped a Chevrolet Impala at around 11:55 p.m. on northbound Route 13 for a traffic violation, said Laurel police Detective Sgt. Derrick Calloway. Upon further investigation, a search uncovered 450 cartons of assorted cigarette brands that were untaxed, Calloway said. The driver, Anwar Ghani, 47, of Elizabeth, N.J., was charged with eight counts of possession of untaxed tobacco.

Ghani told police that he had purchased the cigarettes in North Carolina and was driving back to New Jersey to sell them.

Ghani was committed to the Sussex Correctional Institution after failing to post $16,100 cash bail.

Man Charged In Sex Abuse Of Toddler

CRISFIELD — Police have arrested a Crisfield man in connection with the sexual abuse of a 14-month-old child.

Virgil Eric Dashields, 20, of 157 Somers Cove Apartments, Crisfield, was being held on $50,000 bond in the Somerset County Detention Center following his arrest Monday night, according to the Crisfield Police Department.

The sexual child abuse occurred in the Somers Cove Apartments on Friday, police said.

Dashields was arrested on numerous sex abuse, child abuse, assault and sodomy charges.

Man Brings Alleged Drugs Into Wawa

WEST OCEAN CITY — A man who walked into a convenience store with a half-burned suspected marijuana cigarette tucked behind his ear was spotted by state police and arrested on drug charges.

Tyrone Scruggs, 26, of Pocomoke City entered the Wawa on Route 50 at about 11:20 p.m. Friday with the marijuana cigarette in plain view, police said. When he was searched, police said, a baggie containing crack cocaine and powder cocaine was found in his possession. Scruggs was arrested and charged with drug and paraphernalia possession.

Gun Arrest Made During Traffic Stop

NEWARK — A state trooper who pulled over a vehicle for passing across a double-yellow line found a loaded handgun tucked underneath the driver’s side floor mat. The driver, 21-year-old William Harrison Wilson Jr. of Temperanceville didn’t have a handgun permit, police said. The gun was a .32-caliber Colt revolver and was loaded, police said. Wilson was arrested and charged with carrying a handgun in a vehicle.

Material by: delmarvanow.com

TUSCARORA INDIAN NATION, N.Y., Sept. 16 (UPI) — An American Indian tribe told motorists it may collect tolls from cars to protest a court decision giving New York the right to tax the tribe’s cigarette sales. “It’s not just about taxes,” a member of the Tuscarora tribe told The Buffalo (N.Y.) News. “This is about our freedom and our human rights. We’re supposed to be a sovereign nation, and yet the state keeps trying to tax us.”

Several dozen members of the Iroquoian-language-family tribe carrying signs and flags stopped passing cars on a two-lane state highway and handed fliers to the drivers informing them of the possible toll each time they crossed the reservation line.

“Coming Soon: Tuscarora Toll. $1 per vehicle. Located on Route 31 and Route 104,” the fliers said.

The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, lifted a temporary restraining order Tuesday that had blocked the state from enforcing new tax regulations that let New York collect cigarette taxes from non-Indian customers.

Indians living on the Tuscarora reservation would be exempt from the tax.

“Once they tax cigarettes, what will they want next?” asked Adrian Bigfoot, who said he held no office in the Tuscarora Indian Nation government, but said the government is a participatory democracy in which all Tuscaroras have a voice.

New York is “trying to break our treaties,” he said.

The state Department of Taxation and Finance, responsible for collecting and enforcing state tax laws and dispersing tax revenues, had no immediate comment.

The court ruling does not apply to New York’s Seneca and Cayuga nations, which remain exempt from the tax until at least Sept. 28 due to a separate restraining order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Arcara, radio station WBEN-AM, Buffalo, reported.

HM Revenue and Customs officers have seized counterfeit tobacco worth more than £100,000 in the south of Scotland. The operation, involving Dumfries and Galloway traffic police, was carried out on the A74(M) at about 0045 BST on Friday.

A van was stopped taining more than half a tonne of smuggled tobacco – some concealed inside sandals which had been brought into the country from China.

The HMRC said the driver had been detained and inquiries were ongoing.

A spokesman said the operation was part of ongoing “disruption tactics” against organised Chinese criminal gangs involved in the import, processing and packaging of counterfeit hand-rolling tobacco.

The van was found to contain 50 boxes of tobacco along with a large amount of counterfeit packaging.

Original from: bbc.co.uk

Through most of the 20th Century, movies with characters puffing away on cigarettes helped make smoking a popular, and in some circles, necessary status symbol. In the 1940s’ and 1950s’, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and scores of other established Hollywood stars always had a smoke in hand at some point in their films. Decades later, James Bond and Superman’s girl friend, Lois Lane, puffed away in front of audiences filled with many an impressionable teenager.

Not surprisingly, moviegoers of all ages tended to associate cigarette smoking with glamour, vigorous youth, sexiness, wealth, and occasionally rebelliousness. I remember that my mom did not care all that much for cigarettes, but briefly took up its use in response to peer pressure.

As the major adverse health effects of tobacco have become widely publicized over the past 30 years, smoking has declined both on and off the screen in the United States. Nevertheless, 43 million Americans (many of them youngsters) remain addicted to the evil weed and 450,000 a year die prematurely from it. Despite efforts to diminish the presence and discredit the allure of smoking in films, 54 percent of movies with parental guidance ratings still have smoking in their narratives.

As long as smoking is legal, it is unconstitutional to ban the practice from appearing on the silver screen. Nonetheless, films containing smoking can still be rated “R”, be preceded by anti-smoking messages, and be prohibited from displaying actual brands and receiving compensation for such actions. Many jurisdictions have adopted these measures, again with middling results in regard to discouraging smoking.

It is thus important to reduce cinematic smoking scenes even further. The Center for Disease Control has conducted studies that show youngsters who are exposed to cigarette use on film continue to be much more likely to take up smoking and set the stage for health problems later in life.

Yet James Cameron, director of the box office smash hit Avatar, fiercely defends the cigarette smoking portrayed by Sigourney Weaver’s character in the film.

“Yes, smoking is a filthy habit,” Cameron says, “but movies should reflect reality. Some people smoke.” There are some cinematic situations where smoking is not glamorized but instead represents a character’s release from anxiety, a brief respite from desperation. Military combat scenes come to mind and are unlikely to produce many new customers for the tobacco companies.

But there is another reality. Smokers are abandoning the habit in droves, and cigarette use is increasingly viewed as a societal stigma. Why not work into movie scripts the rejection of cigarettes for health reasons and the depiction of the lethal medical consequences when rejection is ignored?

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a government agency, has listed cigarettes in movies as a key factor in teen smoking. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has said that studies show a clear link showing that kids who watch movies with smoking are more likely to smoke.

So, it is a small step forward that the CDCP announced last Thursday that scenes of smoking in high-grossing films fell to 1,935 incidents last year, down 49% from the recent peak of 3,967 in 2005.
This may in part be the result of a change in 2007 that includes smoking incidence in MPAA ratings, following four years of requests from state attorneys general and other groups. The MPAA has refused, however, to make smoking an automatic R-rating, even with an exclusion for historical accuracy in films like “Good Night and Good Luck.” “On April 22, 2009, the MPAA interrupted North Carolina Senate debate on landmark smokefree workplace legislation to demand a loophole for smoking in film productions. ‘The motion picture industry worries the bill would prevent actors from smoking on screen,’ reported the Associated Press,” according to Smoke Free Movies. They were successful in getting an exemption written into the law.
A significant factor in reduced smoking onscreen may also be pressure from websites that specifically review smoking in movies. Smoke Free Movies, a project of Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has a directory of actors with more than three smoking roles. Scene Smoking from Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails, shows how smoking is shown in films, classifying it by whether it is the lead actor, a credited non-star, or an extra, whether the brand is shown, and whether the smoker is a good guy or a bad guy.

From blog.beliefnet.com, August 23, 2010

It’s time to fight for the right to sell pipes. So say a group of Florida smoke shop owners who are now suing to quash the state’s “Bong Bill” which makes it illegal to the shops to make more than 25 percent of revenue from the sale of bongs, pipes and other smoking paraphernalia. Thirty shops have joined in the litigation against the law, which took effect July 1.
They claim it’s not only hurting business, it’s also hurting tax revenues.
“This act is a dismal failure,” Clearwater lawyer Luke Lirot, who represents the stores, told the Sun-Sentinel. “You can’t have these shop owners held responsible for the intent of someone else.”

While just a misdemeanor, violators of the law could face up to a year in jail.
The smoke shop owners argue that the bongs aren’t even used for smoking in some instances, and are instead used as decoration.
But supporters of the bill, including St. Petersburg Rep. Darryl Rouson, who sponsored it, says it’s a “charade” for the owners to claim the paraphernalia isn’t used for drugs.
Rouson, a former drug user himself, said he’s trying to fight what he views as rampant drug use in the state. He said the shops need to sell tobacco if they’re going to call them tobacco shops.
“I used to brag, ‘Take me to any city in America and I’ll take you to the head shop and get a nice pipe to smoke,’” he said. “The law allows them to call themselves tobacco shops, yet 80 percent of them don’t sell a stick of tobacco.”
Shop owners like Jay Work, of Grateful J’s in Margate, say the law is one toke over the line.
“The way the whole thing is written is unconstitutional,” Work told the Sun-Sentinel. “There’s no business in the country that has a cap on how much you can sell. It’s like telling Pfizer that no more than 25 percent of your income can come from Viagra because it’s sex-related.”

Material by: nbcmiami.com.

Have you been trying to give up smoking, but just haven’t found the right motivation?
Nothing seems to work, so you keep smoking. What if someone offered you $2,500 to quit smoking next month? Would that help? The Greene County Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Coalition (GCTPC) announced earlier this week that it, along with the state coalition, has launched “Quit Now Indiana” — a statewide “stop smoking” contest offering $5,000 in cash prizes that is designed to encourage Hoosiers to quit using tobacco. (more…)

The United States Health Department had an unmet 2010 health goal for the quit smoking campaign to decrease the rate of high school student smokers to only sixteen percent this year. The nation has failed to reach this 2010 health goal, probably due in part to the tobacco industry’s $12 billion marketing campaign winning out over the U.S.’s quit smoking advertising campaign. In regards to the quit smoking campaign, also called the anti-smoking campaign, Terry F. Pechacek, the associate director for science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated, “People are getting the image that it’s cool to use nicotine as a drug.

We need to bring back our voice, our antismoking mass media campaign. Overall, the antismoking countermessage has been lost.” Somewhere along the line, the quit smoking campaign has been unsuccessful according to the statics put out by the CDC and other researchers.

When the CDC released its biannual survey of more than 10,000 high school students, it showed that 19.5 percent or one third of the students were smokers. Smoking rates among teens seemed to drop from 1995 to 2003, but then the rate seemed to rise again. Somewhere along the line, the quit smoking campaign began to fail.

Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and Kenneth E. Warner, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan stated, “The prevalence of smoking in the United States hovers at 20 percent, more than eight million people are sick or disabled as a result of tobacco use.” The number of fatalities due to smoking is 450,000 Americans annually, they also shared. The voice of the quit smoking campaign became very faint.

The quit smoking campaign is obviously lacking, experts say. They agreed that the smoking rate in our country was expected to decline only to 16 percent by 2020, and to stabilize at 13.5 percent by the middle of the century; however, unless for active tactics are taken through anti-smoking campaigns in this country, another goal may be unmet once again.

Experts say that instead of America putting money into quit smoking campaigns, the money is being used for another great cause; obesity, including childhood obesity across the country. This includes Mrs. Obama’s national campaign against childhood obesity. The experts also say; however, that all concentration cannot soley be on obesity, but must be used towards the smoking epidemic and anti-smoking campaigns as well. If not, we will never see smoking rates decrease.

Material from: huliq.com