NEW YORK - With the price of a pack of cigarettes in New York City as high as $12, the sale of single cigarettes ?" "loosies" ?" is on the rise, The New York Times reports.

The Times featured one street vendor, Lonnie Werner, aka Lonnie Loosie, who sells as many as 2,000 loosies per day. "The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much," Warner said.

Two partners typically accompany Warner and together they peddle smokes along a city block. He said he purchases his cigarettes, usually Newports, for slightly more than $50 a carton from smugglers who purchase them in Virginia, where the state tax is far lower than it is in New York. He then resells them for 75 cents apiece or two for $1, or $8 for a pack.

Warner told the newspaper that he and his two partners took home up to $150 a day in from selling roughly 2,000 cigarettes, mostly two at a time. His illegal business is so good that he said he intends to buy health insurance for the first time. Until now, he has relied on the free health checkups he receives at Rikers Island, where he has been sent more than a dozen times after being arrested for selling the illegal loosies.