The Massachusetts Senate is pressing to increase the tax on flavored cigars, flavored smoking tobacco, and flavored “blunt wraps” — sometimes used to smoke marijuana — from 40 percent to 210 percent in an attempt to reduce youth use of products that come in such flavors as white grape and vanilla.
If the tax hike were to become law, Massachusetts would have the highest flavored-cigar tax in the country, according to advocates and opponents of the push.
The tax would be imposed on cigar distributors. So, for instance, a retailer buying a $1 flavored cigar would pay a $2.10 tax, significantly but opaquely raising the price for consumers.
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Unflavored and tobacco-flavored cigars would remain taxed at 40 percent. The sales tax would continue to be applied as well.
The lead sponsor of the effort said boosting the tax would help reduce youth smoking by making the price prohibitive. Senator Jason M. Lewis, Democrat of Winchester, said he sees it as “just closing a tax loophole” since smokeless tobacco, a category that includes chewing tobacco, is already taxed at 210 percent, and cigarettes are highly taxed as well.
Antismoking advocates applaud the tax hike effort.
But large convenience store associations are crying foul. They say retailers have extremely high levels of compliance with restricting sales to minors, and they argue the tax would squeeze mom-and-pop stores.
The measure was included in the yearly state budget proposal from the Senate, but not the one from the House.
The two chambers are hashing out differences between their spending plans for the new fiscal year, which begins Wednesday, so the new tax could be included, but is not certain to be.
House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo recently said it was the House’s opinion that there be “no new taxes, whether large or small.”
Still, DeLeo said, “we’ll have to wait and see” the final product of budget negotiations.
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Asked about Governor Charlie Baker’s stance on the measure, spokeswoman Elizabeth Guyton said in a statement that the governor has proposed a budget to set the state “on a fiscally responsible path without tax increases and is opposed to raising taxes.”
Massachusetts has long worked to diminish youth tobacco use, with apparent success, according to statistics provided by Scott Zoback, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Health.
In 1995, 35.7 percent of high school students had smoked a cigarette in the last 30 days. That number had dropped to 10.7 percent by 2013, Zoback said. The same year, 10.8 percent of Massachusetts high school students had used cigars, cigarillos, or little cigars in the past 30 days, a drop from two years earlier.
Lewis, a leader of the Legislature’s public health committee, said it’s good news that youth cigarette smoking is down. The bad news, he argued, is that tobacco companies have responded by introducing a range of new products, including flavored cigars at prices that kids can afford.
The cheapest pack of cigarettes in the state is about $7, he said, while a flavored cigar can be bought individually for less than a dollar.
Cigars used to be seen as less youth-friendly, Lewis said. “What’s changed is the tobacco companies have seen a market opportunity and introduced a whole new line of flavored products.”
Altria, which owns a company that makes cigars and pipe tobacco, says on its website that “there is a long history of adult consumer interest in flavor varieties in other [non-cigarette] tobacco products.”
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Tom Briant, executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets, a retail tobacco trade group that represents 40,000 tobacco stores and convenience stores across the country, said, “What a tax increase of this magnitude will do is cause significant reductions in legal sales to adults by law-abiding retailers.”
And he scoffed at the idea it would reduce youth use, arguing that the vast majority of minors get tobacco from social sources, such as older friends or parents.
Steve Ryan, executive director of the New England Convenience Store Association, which represents hundreds of store locations throughout Massachusetts, said, “The concern that we have is that the sales that now occur in the legal channels will go to the Internet, to stores out of state, or to the black market.”
But Kevin O’Flaherty, who oversees advocacy in the Northeast for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a Washington-based nonprofit that works to reduce tobacco use, and backs the Senate effort, said that as taxes on others tobacco products have risen, cigars have been untouched.
“They’ve created an artificial market condition that makes flavored cigars more appealing to kids,” he said. “Kids are the most price-sensitive, so they’re drawn to cheaper products.”
He affirmed that if it were to become law, Massachusetts would indeed have the highest tax in the country on flavored cigars, but framed it as a matter of parity.
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The Massachusetts smokeless tobacco tax, he said, has had that distinction for several years. And “we’ve been trying to close this loophole for some time.”
Joshua Miller can be reached at joshua.miller@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jm_bos.