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Tax will turn smokers
into criminals

Lawmakers had better start allocating some money to build extra prisons to house all the new "smoking criminals" they intend to create over the next several years. In its quest to reach the nirvana of taxation -- a 100 percent tax on something -- Hawaii legislators are halfway home in the cigarette realm.

Senators passed a bill that will increase taxes on cigarettes to $2.60 a pack in three years, more than half of what a pack of cigarettes cost now.

State Rep. Bud Stonebreaker said he worries that jacking up the price of cigarettes by heavy taxation will have the "unexpected" consequence of increasing black market cigarette sales. Wrongo. There's nothing "unexpected" about what happens when you make a popular product too expensive to get legally. If it's too expensive to buy legally -- or simply unavailable -- people will buy it illegally. In effect, you turn a large segment of society into criminals. (See: 18th Amendment, 1920)

To make the transition from good citizen to criminal just that much easier, our lawmakers helpfully made ordering cigarettes over the Internet illegal.

Several legislators want to make cigarettes illegal in Hawaii, setting the stage for thousands of otherwise law-abiding residents to become part of a vast new criminal underworld.

BUT WE WON'T have to wait until that prohibition to see smoking grannies and aunties hauled away to the slammer. The new taxes on cigarettes should cause regular folks to go to the dark side. Because you don't need any Al Capone-type characters to sneak contraband into the islands. American Indians got that covered. Indians are making millions in the cheap cigarette biz on the Internet. One site, discount-cigarettes-store.com, sells cigarettes for only $12.40 a carton. That's about $1.20 a pack, or less than the Hawaii tax on cigarettes! The site is run by the Seneca Indian Nation (the cursor makes cute little smoke rings when it moves on the screen), and it's completely legal. That is, it's legal for them to sell tax-free cigs, it's illegal for you to buy them from Hawaii.

Lawmakers say the hefty tax is just to get smokers to quit. They say it's a health issue. Hah. Why not heavily tax or outlaw all kinds of unhealthy things like hotdogs and mayonnaise? Mayo causes more heart attacks than cigarettes. But, sadly, if mayo were illegal, you'd have to put a prison wall around the entire island, or at least the State Capitol building.