What a difference $1.25 can make
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- June
- 12
  With New York’s newly bumped-up cigarette tax, it seems would-be non-smokers can’t get enough of the Smokers’ Quitline (800-NY-QUITS), according to the state Health Department. Calls to the hotline during the week of June 2—when New York raised its cigarette tax $1.25, to $2.75 per pack—were more than four times what they were a year before. Agency officials say the high volume of calls is a result of the higher tax.
  During the week of June 2-8, the hotline received more than 9,750 calls. Most callers to the Quitline at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo mentioned the higher cigarette tax as their motivation to quit. Between June 4 and 10, 2007, there were just under 2,300 calls. Requests for nicotine-replacement therapy starter kits experienced a similar spike. Smokers asked for some 7,900 started kits the first week of June, compared with 1,722 that week in 2007.
  Although higher cigarette taxes mean more money for the state coffers (the main reason lawmakers and Gov. David Paterson agreed to increase them was to help plug a $5 billion budget gap), Health Department officials see them as a boon for the non-smoking cause. New York has 2.8 million adult smokers. The Center for a Tobacco Free New York has estimated that the tax hike will reduce that number by 140,000.
  “Most smokers want to quit,†state Health Commissioner Richard Daines, a physician, said in a statement. “The cigarette tax is doing exactly what we intended, giving smokers another powerful reason to try to quit. We’re thrilled with these results.â€
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on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 10:38 pm by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
