Paying $6.85 in state and city taxes on a pack of cigarettes? Fuggetaboutit.

Cigarettes sold legally in New York City are amongst the highest taxed in the United States. But a Rutgers University study found that most of the discarded cigarette packs researchers collected throughout the city were brought in from states with much lower taxes on the product.

Of 252 discarded cigarette packs found on the streets across the five boroughs, just 17% had the proper New York City tax stamp — down from 39.3% in 2011 and 23.7% in 2015 when other teams did similar experiments, according to the study.

“It’s arbitrage,” Kevin Schroth, a researcher at Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies and lead author of the study, said in an announcement from the school. “If something is cheaper in on

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