With his favorite cigs costing him nearly $9, BEN LASMAN heads out to a Long Island Indian reservation to score an (almost) criminally cheap pack of smokes.
Jump to full article: New York Press, 2008-08-21
Author: Ben Lasman
Intro: We pulled out of the train station onto a desiccated main drag of Mastic, NY--all tilting delis and RadioShacks--and rolled into a woodsy suburbia.
"Where exactly on the reservation do you want to go?" the driver asked, and I said anywhere on Squaw Lane would be fine. He nodded, but he probably could have guessed where to drop me without asking. I was carrying a backpack. I had just gotten off the LIRR. I was obviously a New Yorker in town to score . . .
Crossing the street to the big trading post, I noticed the crop of vehicles had rotated in its entirety. A woman in an SUV was ordering take-out cigarettes at the smoke shop's drive-thru. I walked past the teenager on the steps and into the store. ...
excise taxes inevitably punish young, poor and minority smokers disproportionately to their more affluent, predominately white counterparts. Add to that the continuing ambiguity over tobacco's place in popular culture (Mad Men offers an illicit fix of smoking porn every week), the massive disparities between states' stamp duties and Bloomberg's monomaniacal anti-cigarette rhetoric--and the moral and economic, if not medical, consequences of smoking--become increasingly difficult to dissect.
"Cigarettes are a legal product," argues Audrey Silk .. .
Silk, with a voice like a trash compactor, sounds as if she had been smoking packs in her sleep since the '60s. For a woman who advocates for the inalienable rights of smokers, I can't think of a more persuasive poster child to dissuade kids from lighting up. Then again, the current generation of 18- to 24-year-old smokers, myself included, are as willfully ignorant as anyone that our nicotine fix won't eventually kill us.
I smoked my first cigarette when I was 16, and never really stopped. It was a few years later that I realized that every bit of anti-smoking propaganda I'd heard as a child was effectively true. . . .
Visiting the reservation, one is struck not only with the scale of the operation--a dozen or more stores within yards of each other--but the seemingly uninhibited desire to expand. All around the block, construction crews were erecting new stores, and outside the existing sellers, residents had erected mountains of cartons on foldout tables. The entire population, it seemed, had cohered around a single business model. Even Chief Wallace has his office inside a smoke shop. . . .
the incident still served as fodder for critics of the reservation's practices, indicating simultaneously that enormous sums of money were being made in the absence of tax enforcement and that infiltrating the community from the outside, as Mullen had done by marrying a Native American woman, was not particularly difficult. While Mullen had no proven terrorist ties, the basic message gleaned from the scandal remained consistent with Bloomberg and King's warning: Violence and disorder were inherent to the continued forbearance of the state. The reservations must be forced to tax their customers.
What these arguments fail to acknowledge is that criminal consequences occur on both sides of the legislation. While cracking down on reservation sales may mean the curtailing of certain smugglers, it also may lead to more felonies being committed in the city in the name of cigarettes.
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