A new study shows that a national tracking system of cigarette movements from manufacturer to consumer would reduce cigarette trafficking between states, while boosting the health benefits of state cigarette tax policies, according to a Reuters report.
The report said that smokers can evade taxes if there is no federal program that could track the movement of cigarettes from one state to the next. Also, there will be no barriers to youth smoking, while local governments miss out to collect possible revenues.
"What is key about this is that these calculations are not actual losses in revenue," Kevin Davis, lead researcher of the North Carolina-based RTI International, which is a nonprofit research organization, told Reuters. "This is money that could be added to government income."
Davis and his colleagues calculated that cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Providence and Washington, DC could collect between $690 and $729 million in annual revenues if interstate trafficking of cigarettes is prevented.
For example, the study shows that if New York City eliminated the trafficking of cigarettes, an estimated 5 percent of its youth would not smoke cigarette, while overall adult cigarette usage would decrease by 7 percent.
"Where illegal trafficking exists, taxes are not being paid, but also the person who buys the product pays less," Joanna Cohen, director of the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, told Reuters. "If there's a lower price, then there is less incentive to reduce smoking."
Cohen was not involved in the research.
Davis and his research team collected cigarette packaging litter during a three-week period in 2011. They looked for the local tax stamps of the packaging to have what they called "a good sense of what is happening at the street level."
They were able to collect a total of 1,439 cigarette packs and nearly 50 percent lacked the tax stamps that should have corresponded with the location where they were found.
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