There's a magical place in Chinatown — for now — called Island Smokes, where the price of a pack of cigarettes hovers around $5. The trick is that you have to make them yourself — the shop sells "all natural" tobacco and papers, and has machines where customers can assemble the raw supplies. The city is suing the store: "By selling illegally low-priced cigarettes, defendants not only interfere with the collection of city cigarette taxes, they also impair the city’s smoking cessation programs and impair individual efforts at smoking reduction, thereby imposing higher health care costs on the city and injuring public health," says a lawsuit filed last week. The company's lawyer contends, "We are selling the contents that produce the cigarette and it’s up to the user to make them," comparing it to "making your own beer."
"Just leave people alone,” one customer told the New York Times. "In this economy, no one can barely afford food, let alone a pack of $15 cigarettes."
