In Tax Fight, Tribes Make, and Sell, Cigarettes

[alp227]

Cigarettes are manufactured and packaged in the back of the Native Pride smoke shop and gas station, one of the four cigarette enterprises on Seneca land. (James Estrin/The New York Times)

ONEIDA, N.Y. — The trucks lumber past cornfields and dilapidated farm houses, pull up to a onetime bingo hall and unload their cargo: boxes of tobacco imported from the Carolinas.

Inside, employees of the Oneida Indian Nation dump the shredded tobacco leaves into rolling machines and fashion them into cigarettes to be sold at a dozen tribal convenience stores midway between Syracuse and Utica.

The cigarettes, branded with names like Niagara’s and Bishop, sell for as little as $39.95 for a 10-pack carton — much cheaper than those at non-Indian retailers — and bring in millions of dollars a year to the tribe, which also has a resort casino, five golf courses and a multimedia production house.

“We tried poverty for 200 years,” the Oneidas’ leader, Ray Halbritter, said in an interview. “We decided to try something different.”

The Oneidas’ cigarette manufacturing business is part of a new strategy that is quickly being embraced among New York’s eight federally recognized Indian tribes. After years of fighting a losing battle against the state over the taxation of name-brand cigarettes sold on reservations, many are now manufacturing their own cigarettes.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/nyregion/indian-tribes-make-own-cigarettes-to-avoid-ny-tax.html?pagewanted=all

[DocMac]

1. The crickets are busy!

[Mosby]

2. It's a shame that NA tribes have to make a living off of vice.

If NA reservations are sovereign lands as they have always claimed why not start growing coca plants and opium poppy, I hear there is a lot of money in that.