A suit to stop New York State from banning online cigarette sales is but the latest strand in the tobacco web our politicians have woven. In this web, concerns about public health cross paths freely with the insatiable desire for more tax dollars and the uncontrollable urge, for some, to dictate the lifestyles of others. We tax cigarettes. We ban cigarettes. We support cigarette makers. And we depend on their revenues as a spider depends on unlucky flies.

They certainly are juicy targets. In 2002, New York State collected about $1 billion in taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products — quite a chunk of change, and by far the bulk of the state’s excise take. And, what did the state do last year, having tripled its tax and nearly doubled its take since 1990? Naturally, it raised taxes again, to $1.50 from $1.11 a pack, to finance Governor Pataki’s election-year payoff to the state’s health-care union, SEIU/1199. Mayor Bloomberg, staring down the yawning chasm that is New York City’s budget, went and boosted the city’s tax from $0.08 to a whopping $1.50 a pack.

So, facing a combined cigarette tax of $3 in the city, and a still-high $1.50 elsewhere in the state, consumers — who, after all, are the ones we are taxing when we say, euphemistically, that we are “taxing cigarettes” — are ticked off. And they’re taking their business elsewhere. Since few states are in New York’s league when it comes to cigarette taxes (Massachusetts edges us out by a penny, New Jersey ties us, and Washington, Oregon, and Michigan are on our tail), it is no sweat to find enterprising retailers in low-tax states ready to swoop in and undercut New York’s high-tax bodegas and drug stores.

The way to do it is with a Web site. The state hates online sales because it is so difficult to collect taxes on them. The sales aren’t exempt from taxes technically; consumers are supposed to report their purchases and remit the taxes themselves. No one does this — not on mundane purchases subject only to sales tax and certainly not on cigarettes subject to punitive excise levies. As recently as April 8, New York City filed suit against seven out-of-state online cigarette retailers for defrauding the state, seeking $15 million in back taxes. The city sued under a law known as the Jenkins Act, which is almost never enforced.

Facing an uphill battle, with cigarette taxes rising faster in New York than anywhere else in the country — and with hundreds of Web sites popping up, hawking cigarettes — the Legislature passed a law in 2000, which the governor signed, making it illegal “for any person engaged in the business of selling cigarettes to ship…any cigarettes to any person in this state” other than wholesalers and exporters. The law also made it illegal for any carrier to “knowingly transport cigarettes to any person” in New York, putting UPS on the hook. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. Inc. challenged this and won at the district court level, getting the law declared in violation of the Commerce Clause. But the U.S. Court of Ap peals for the Second Circuit overturned the decision, and no appeal is imminent. Thus, a crackdown could come any day.

The purpose of this law is exquisitely clear. Both the district and circuit courts accepted a study, submitted by the plaintiffs challenging the law, showing that, of children who had purchased cigarettes illegally, only about 1.9% had ever used the Internet to do so. In fact, buying cigarettes online might be the most difficult way a child could go about obtaining tobacco: One usually needs a credit card, photo identification, and a mailing address that can accept face-to-face deliveries from carriers such as UPS. Such a vigorous system of self-regulation has been undertaken by the Online Tobacco Retailers Association, the group filing the newest challenge to the online cigarette sales ban.

The zeal to close down these online smoke shops has risen in proportion to the state’s tax rate and budget gap. This is no reason for the state to go running athwart of the Commerce Clause, discriminating against sellers from states that have not chosen to overload their tobacco merchants with taxes, like Kentucky and North Carolina, or the Native-American Seneca nation in upstate New York.

What is most perverse, however, is the extent to which New York and other states operate with the blessing of the big tobacco companies, with whom they have formed a symbiotic relationship. When Philip Morris gets in trouble, as it did recently with an Illinois court that almost forced it into bankruptcy, states like New York rush to its defense. Mr. Pataki would have hated to have missed the $330 million Philip Morris paid the state this year as part of the Master Settlement Agreement. And companies like Philip Morris hate the competition from smaller brands that comes online, where shelf-space is unlimited. What a tangled web, indeed.