NEW YORK -- Although New York City claims that cigarette sales have been cut in half by a new law that went into effect July 1 raising taxes on cigarettes to $3.54, bringing the price to $7.50 a pack, it doesn't mean that people are smoking half as many cigarettes--it means "smokers have become more enterprising in their efforts to beat the tax." Instead, they are turning to Indian reservation smokeshops and to the Internet, said a CBS Evening News "Eye on America" report yesterday.

Illegal cigarettes being sold in some stores in the city--many with counterfeit tax stamps--are just part of the problem, said the report. Martha Starck, NYC Finance Commissioner, told CBS News that about 6,000 cartons of illegal cigarettes have been seized in various law enforcement efforts. A CBS producer bought untaxed cigarettes at a store in Brooklyn. The store’s owner now faces felony charges and up to four years in prison for counterfeiting tax stamps.

PLAISTOW, N.H.-- Hundreds of service stations in New Hampshire are refusing to pay part of a $65 million Superfund waste cleanup, testing how far the federal government should go in recovering costs from businesses whose waste winds up at the Environmental Protection Agency’s toxic waste cleanup Superfund sites.

The Boston Globe reports that cleanup of the former Beede Waste Oil Co. in Plaistow, N.H., is at issue. For decades, thousands of New England service stations and auto repair shops sent waste from car oil changes to the waste company. The stations broke no laws and had no idea that Beede was letting oil seep into the groundwater below, creating what the newspaper says is one of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites.