Thursday, September 27, 2007

2 Cartons Of Cigarettes Equal 6 Months in Jail & Vehicular Seizure

Yep. When you bring 2 cartons of cigarettes across the state line into Tennessee the law states you could be penalized with a Class B Misdemeanor resulting in 6 months jail time and/or a $500 dollar fine. Oh, your vehicle becomes seized as well as they are considered contraband. If you bring 25 + cartons over the boarder you could be penalized with a Class E Felony resulting in a 1 year minimum sentence up to 6 years, a $3,000 dollar fine and you still get your vehicle seized.

These laws have been on the books for a while, so why bring them up? They are going to be enforced. Tennessee Department of Revenue has already been scoping out neighboring state's "hot" areas where Tennesseans have been going to buy cigarettes to avoid the .62 cent tax that TN has imposed on tobacco products.

You can read more here.

Some questions:
-Are state paid workers allowed to travel out of state, steak out a tobacco shop/gas station and call an officer back on the TN side of the border to alert him that a TN tagged car is coming with x amount of cigarette cartons?
-What are your thoughts about this law? Should this law be enforced? Who has the right to decide?
-Does this law affect your tobacco habits?
-What is the purpose of this law being enforced? Would there be a better way of achieving that same purpose?

5 comments:

misawa said...

It's things like this that just stir my inner libertarian. Rather than devoting that effort to increasing patrols in troubled neighborhoods where there are actual victims (break-ins, robberies, assaults, murders), they want to go after people committing a crime where there is really no victim - except maybe government (loss of tax revenue), but that's a stretch for me.

j razz said...

You ought to check out this guy misawa. He is a full fledged libertarian. His name is George B and he comes on the radio (internet radio too) from 3-6pm CST on WNWS FM. You might like him to an extent. I started out with a real bad taste in my mouth, but after I figured him out, I realized most of the time is he spot on... although he does wear pink.

j razz

j razz said...

Here is the Internet Radio Link that didn't work in the above post for some reason.

j razz

misawa said...

Yeah... the pink thing is kinda weird. Some guys look ok in it. I'm not one of those. Neither is he.

I'll have to give him a listen sometime. Around here there's Boortz, but in the evenings there's Chris Crock, who tends to lean libertarian but mostly discusses local stories, occasionally national.

j razz said...

He gave me a "Pocket American" which is a pretty neat little book. It has the Constitution in it (in type form instead of script). It has the Declaration of Independence, it has the Mayflower Compact, all of the Amendments, all of the contact numbers for our elected officials, etc. It is a handy, compact book that has a plethora of information that all citizens should be familiar with in it.

He is very much a libertarian.

j razz