Albany, NY – A ruling by the United States Supreme Court will cast a shadow over one of the successes Governor Spitzer claimed during his tenure as attorney general: his work to curtail online purchases of cigarettes.
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Online cigarette sales, Mr. Spitzer and other state attorneys general found, were allowing smokers to evade taxes and permit minors to get around age requirements. Some states, such as New York, enacted criminal penalties for truck drivers who knowingly delivered boxes of tobacco. Mr. Spitzer used an investigation to leverage the United Parcel Service into giving up the transporting of tobacco to smokers nationwide.
Yesterday the federal high court unanimously struck down a Maine law that forbids deliveries of tobacco to individual consumers and burdens truckers with enforcing the law. The law is similar though not identical, to New York’s.
The trucking industry has criticized the state laws as being not only burdensome but also, ultimately, ineffective. Online cigarette retailers, industry representatives say, sidestep the laws by shipping through the federal United States Postal Service, which is not subject to state laws.
“Why should the mailman be able to deliver them to your door and the UPS driver has to go to jail?” the president of the New York State Motor Truck Association, William Joyce, said. [NYsun]