What Shortage?

For U.S. smokers, inhaling more air than they liked last week, there was a sardonic note of cheer. So many cigarets were being diverted into the black market that racketeers grumbled that prices were falling. In Manhattan, where tobacconists guessed that half of all the popular-brand cigarets were being sold over the ceiling, black market wholesale prices were down 30-c- a carton from the peak of $2.40.

The Bureau of Internal Revenue had its own grim little joke: it statistically proved that there really should be no shortage. In January of 1944, when there was none, 20,115,137,677 cigarets went on the domestic market. In January of this year, there was only .185% less, even though no one seemed to have got a full supply. These figures, civilian smokers complained acridly, blithely ignored the fact that the strain of war on the home front had turned them all into chain smokers.

It was certainly no comfort to know that if they smoked no more cigarets than they had a year ago, the shortage would end. As they automatically fell in at the end of any line, hoping that cigarets were being sold at the other end, they took a wry pleasure in the knowledge that their misery would soon have company. Pipe tobacco was becoming scarce. Chewing tobacco was next.

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