Cigarette facts, effects of cigarettes smoking

Smokers might soon have to pay higher cigarettes taxes in Mississippi, and the owner of a small grocery store in the northeastern corner of the state says he's worried about losing cross-border customers.

"If you pop a big tax on 'em, what's going to happen is I'm going to be higher on prices than the surrounding states," Rick Sparks said in a phone interview Wednesday from Golden Grocery, about 5 miles west of Alabama and 20 miles south of Tennessee.
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Mississippi's current cigarette excise tax is 18 cents a pack. That's the third lowest in the nation, according to the Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

Mississippi legislators have been fighting over a possible cigarette tax since 2006, and the efforts have fizzled.

There's more momentum now because Republican Gov. Haley Barbour - a former tobacco lobbyist in Washington - opposed tobacco tax bills the past few years but said last fall that he'll support a modest increase in 2009. His proposal is close to the Senate position.