Probably because there's no nearby place to get untaxed cigarettes, and there's not enough profit in growing tobacco and making cigarettes from scratch. When I

Probably because there's no nearby place to get untaxed cigarettes, and there's not enough profit in growing tobacco and making cigarettes from scratch. When I was in high school, back in the early '90s, the difference in taxes on cigarettes between Ontario and New York was a few dollars a pack - enough to cause a huge black market in smuggled cross-border cigarettes. I didn't buy a legal pack in four years. Now, amusingly, taxes in New York have been raised so much that they're the target of smugglers. (And in Ontario, the Indian reservations that used to do all the smuggling got into the direct manufacturing business, since they can sell on the reservation tax-free.)