For tobacco growers on Virginia’s Old Belt, as for the nation’s No. 1 cigarette-maker, Henrico County-based Altria Group, the future looks like one with an ever-shrinking number of American smokers.
It’s a lot more expensive to buy cigarettes than it was 25 years ago, when the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement put cigarette makers on the hook to pay billions of dollars a year to states, to compensate them for what their Medicaid systems paid for smokers’ health care.
A pack of cigarettes that now averages about $7.68 in Virginia — below the national average of $8.41 and far below New York’s $12.89 — typically cost around $2 a pack before the master settlement pushed prices higher.
Read the full story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
