This is totally off the beaten track of your story here, but I had forgotten all about the “loosies" controversy that I sometimes heard about when I lived in New York City.

Selling loose cigarettes is apparently illegal for some sort of tax reason. The people who buy loose cigarettes tend to be poor. Bodegas tend to sell them to people who don’t have enough money to buy a whole pack, and when pack prices started to skyrocket back around the turn of the millennium, that became kind of a big deal to some people.

So cop task forces would raid bodegas looking for loosy pirates. The optics were, to say the least, less than lovely. I used to see news photos of dozens of armed cops crashing into a tiny store run by a mom and pop who committed the horrifying crime of selling cigarettes to poor people.

And of course, being the New York City Police department, the cops would be incredibly brutal. “NYPD cop" equals brutal bully, or at least that was almost invariably true then. People say that’s changed a little bit, but I’m not so sure how true that is.

NYPD spent much of last summer brutalizing Act Up protesters, weekly, near Stonewall, of all things.

Anyway, just a quick diversion in case people might be wondering why the bodega guy might not always sell you a loose cigarette.