Lawsuit filed over ‘roll your own’ cigarette tax

The roll-your-own tobacco industry said this morning that they are filing a lawsuit against a measure that would tax their product like retail cigarettes. Roll-your-own machines let customers produce a carton of cigarettes for about half the cost of what they’d pay for those sold at retail stores.

A law passed earlier this year would begin taxing these cigarettes like retail smokes, as of July 1. The group filing the lawsuit argues that this “raises taxes,” and therefore should have required a 2/3 vote to pass, due to Initiative 1053. Supporters of taxing roll-your-own smokes as retail cigarettes say the law closes a loophole, and argue that the products are essentially the same.

 The lawsuit was filed in Franklin County by a local resident and consumer, a Benton County tobacco retailer, and RYO Machine – the major supplier of the machines.