Cigarettes blog news.

To thwart a raise in the cigarette tax imposed by Congress in April, 2009, which bumped cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco, and small cigars to an equally higher rate, growing numbers of cigarette smokers have switched to either rolling their own using less-taxed pipe tobacco, whose sales have increased from 240,000 to 3 million pounds per month, or to smoking a new breed of small, filtered cigars made just big enough to technically qualify them as low-taxed large cigars, whose monthly sales have more than doubled, to over a billion pounds per month.

These smokers' tax dodges have frustrated the government, which loses from $600 million to $1.1 billion in uncollected revenues per year, and the American Cancer Society, which calls the ploys "counterproductive for the public health."

It’s a familiar work scene: a group of faithful smokers, huddled in ever-more-distant locations outside the office, in weather fair or foul, talking about the trials and travails of their day between well-savored drags. Not in Northborough. An extremely rare clause built into the contract of the town’s municipal union back in 1994 bars union employees hired after that date from smoking, not just at work, but in their personal lives as well. “It’s certainly positive from my point of view,” said Board of Health Director Jamie Terry, who, along with others in town, isn’t really sure exactly why it was enacted in the first place but said it hasn’t been disruptive. D.J. Wilson, tobacco control director for the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said he hasn’t come across another municipality in the state that bans smoking, and doubted any town in New England has a similar provision.

All police and firefighters are banned from smoking by a law that came into effect in 1988, he said, so perhaps the town thought it would be progressive in 1994 when it decided to extend the provision to municipal employees. The town may have also been thinking it would save on health insurance, he said, although data showing whether the town has saved money as a result of the requirement doesn’t seem to exist. “It’s really one of these very odd things where it’s been good for them,” he said, but not too useful as a measuring stick for other communities. Town Administrator John Coderre said the requirement was likely negotiated for two reasons: first, because it promotes health among employees, and second, for the savings in health insurance.

Although the restriction only affects those in the union — not the School Department or town department heads, for example — he said he can’t think of a single department head who smokes. “Peer pressure is a good thing,” said Debbie Bent, an administrative assistant for the Fire Department who said it’s refreshing to work in a town where virtually nobody smokes. “It clings to your clothing, and your whole office smells,” she said. “This creates a much more pleasant environment.” Bent served as vice president of the town union for years, and said no one has ever really made a stink about the requirement that she can recall. “When it was negotiated, the people who smoked were grandfathered, so anybody new came on knowing that’s what the rules were,” she said.