New Tax on Tobacco

* You did cigarette-smoking readers a great disservice in “New Tax Fires Ingenuity of State’s Die-Hard Smokers” (Nov. 16), on attempts to avoid California’s new tobacco tax. It’s certainly true that going through shenanigans like getting cigarettes from other states or Mexico by mail or other means is highly cumbersome. It’s also true that sale or possession for sale of untaxed cigarettes is a misdemeanor. However, you omitted to mention that possession of untaxed cigarettes in California, even for purposes of self-consumption, can violate state and federal criminal laws.

Under federal law, possession of more than 60,000 untaxed cigarettes in California with intent to evade the tobacco tax is a crime. Avoidance of $25,000 worth of tobacco taxes in a 12-month period by importing cigarettes into California is also a crime. Seeing as how smoking even properly taxed cigarettes in jail is also forbidden, it would behoove smokers to either pay the new tax, or, better yet, just quit smoking.

ALEX RICCIARDULLI

Los Angeles

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Prop. 10 is punitive, discriminatory taxation on smokers. All the pictures of smiling faces of children seen on Rob Reiner’s Web site do not obfuscate the inherent unfairness of the initiative.

If the programs mentioned in the initiative are truly desirable, why doesn’t the entire population of California pay for them? This fact alone demonstrates the ambiguity of public opinion on the subject (to say nothing of the narrow margin Prop. 10 won by). This is no “victory for the children,” as Reiner said; it simply shows that the public has a tendency to pass any initiative so long as someone else pays for it. And Reiner knows it.

A democratic republic was designed to protect its minority citizens from the tyranny of the majority. Reiner has demonstrated how easily that principle can be usurped.

NEAL TOMBLIN

Vista