As if the health hazards associated with tobacco use today are not sufficient to make one stop, the price of tobacco products here in Virginia (in many respects the "home" of tobacco) is set to rise drastically. For example, the cost of a carton of main brand cigarettes will soon be around $40.00.
Back when almost everyone I knew in the Army smoked (including me) the Army gave us cigarettes in C-rations for free, five to a pack, no filters. If you bought them in the PX, a pack was less than twenty-five cents. In Vietnam, the price was far less, and since we had C-rations many days of the year, we usually had all the smokes we wanted, for free. Different story today.
A letter to the editor in our local paper today complained that since poor people were the ones who make up the largest percentage of tobacco users, raising the retail price is essentially a tax on the poor. If such is true (and I don't know it to be) then I have a question.
If one is "poor" I assume they have less money to spend on things like tobacco. Same thing goes with money spent for alcohol (beer) and cell phone monthly contracts. Why then, are so many of the so-called "poor" people wiling to spend so much on things they don't really need, using money they supposedly don't have?
