The new tax is slated to place $1.60 tax on the cost of a pack of cigarettes, raising it from $2.75 to $4.35—higher than the previous proposal to add $1 per pack. The taxes are projected to raise $290 million in extra revenue to help close a budget gap of $9.2 billion, reported Business Week.

UNM students said a 75 cent tax increase on cigarettes won’t be driving them to Nicorette any time soon.The state legislature passed a 75 cent increase to the current 91 cent cigarette tax last week, bringing the overall tax to a $1.61 per pack. However, smokers say the increase will not deter them from lighting-up.“People pay out the nose for heroin,” UNMsophomore Jesse Clifton said. “I think an addiction is an addiction.”Graduate student Sophia Hammett said imposing the cigarette tax is a way to tax a population that is least likely to resist and is often a more viable option for legislators than other tax increases.

With no accompanying reform and no corresponding tax relief, South Carolina’s “Republican-controlled” General Assembly has voted to raise the state’s cigarette tax by fifty cents per pack – overriding S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford’s veto of the legislation last week.

Upstate doctors doctors are hailing the cigarette tax increase, but some smokers say they arent sure it will make much difference. I see the consequences of smoking every day in the operating room respiratory disease, vascular and heart disease, and multiple forms of cancer, said Dr. Rob Morgan, an anti-smoking advocate and anesthesiologist with Greenville Hospital System who said the move was 30 years overdue.This will reduce the burden of disease associated with tobacco use, he said.Morgan said he isnt sure the increase would have passed without the states budget crisis, which added a degree of urgency to the situation.With the looming Medicaid shortfall, he said, our legislators understood this was finally something they had to do.