Representatives of bodegas and convenience stores complained at a Council hearing in Lower Manhattan that the proposals would make cigarettes so hard to get from legitimate businesses that they would drive customers into the arms of bootleg distributors, including organized crime.
"This is bad for New York," Chong Sik Lee, president of the Korean-American Grocers Association of New York, said at the hearing. Referring to the many immigrant retailers in his organization, he added, "How may they build up business they can pass on to their children?"
The Council is considering legislation that would make it illegal for stores to sell cigarettes to anyone under 21, up from 18. But smoking or possessing cigarettes under that age would not be illegal. It is also considering barring retailers from openly displaying cigarettes and other tobacco products; raising penalties when retailers are found in possession of illegal cigarettes; setting a minimum price of $10.50 per pack of cigarettes or little cigars and barring discounts of tobacco products.
Thursday's hearing was the first chance for opponents of the proposed laws to be heard since Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a Democratic mayoral candidate, announced the proposed age minimum. Ms. Quinn, however, left before opponents had a chance to speak.
Robert S. Bookman, a lawyer for the N.Y.C. Newsstand Operators Association, a 25-year-old trade group, said that hiding cigarettes behind a curtain or a wall in stores would just backfire, because retailers would plaster the walls with advertising.
"You think they're going to be empty, blank?" Mr. Bookman said of the cabinets and other places where cigarettes would be concealed.
"So we should do that next," retorted Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo, a Bronx Democrat who leads the Council's health committee.
"Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your position, we do have something called the First Amendment in this country," Mr. Bookman said.
Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city's health commissioner, told the Council hearing that several years after the town of Needham, Mass., increased the age for buying cigarettes to 21, the number of high school students who reported smoking in the past month had declined to 5.5 percent from 12.9 percent.
Ramon Murphy, president of the Bodega Association of the United States, complained that cigarette taxes were already so high in New York that people would rather pay $6 a pack on the black market than $12 retail.
Dr. Farley acknowledged that high cigarette taxes had made the city an attractive destination for bootleggers, costing the city an estimated $250 million to $600 million a year in unpaid taxes.
He said the answer to the problem was to crack down on trafficking and tax evasion.
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