United States
In the United States each of the fifty states taxes cigarette packs at a different price. In 1992 states charged an average of 25 cents. By January 2002 that average increased to 45 cents. Six months later states, trying to compensate for budget deficits, raised their cigarette taxes to an average 54 cents. According to John D'Angelo of the U.S. government's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), there is a "direct relationship between the increase in a state's tax and an increase in illegal trafficking." This is true with all psychotropic substances, the more the state tries to repress the trade with a legal or illegal substance, the higher the prices and with them the profit margins become. The U.S. government foiled funding operations by Al Qaeda in New York in 1999 and Hezbollah in North Carolina in 2002.
It has been reported that smuggling one truckload of cigarettes within the United States can lead to a profit of US$2 million.
Read more about this topic: Cigarette Smuggling
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“I thought it altogether proper that I should take a brief furlough from official duties at Washington to mingle with you here to-day as a comrade, because every President of the United States must realize that the strength of the Government, its defence in war, the army that is to muster under its banner when our Nation is assailed, is to be found here in the masses of our people.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)