January 4, 2005
Kamloops Daily News



Ken Knight wanted to reduce the health risk of smoking so he
switched to "light" cigarettes.  Knight, from a small town
north of Vancouver, now feels deceived after smoking for 17
years.

As it turns out, light cigarettes are no safer that regular. 
Knight is taking Imperial Tobacco to court.  He alleges
Imperial knowingly withheld information that its products
were harmful and it "unfairly and unjustly profited from its
deceptive acts and practices."

Imperial counters that they were doing nothing illegal - -
the tar content of their cigarettes met federal regulations
for labeling of light cigarettes.

Their contention is revealing.  For decades, governments
approved superficial changes to cigarettes but never
seriously tried to make the toxic, addictive product
illegal.  Governments were as hooked on tobacco as smokers. 
The taxes collected were too hard to pass up on,  and
tobacco corporations were big contributors to political
parties.

The tobacco/government pact served both partners well and
neither one put the health of consumers first.   Big tobacco
continued to sell a dangerous product and governments did
nothing to stop them.

Spokespersons from tobacco corporations were so confident of
their partnership with government that they could joke about
the problem, even though it was black humour.   The tobacco
industry supported a study that said that smoking was
beneficial because it killed smokers prematurely.  In doing
so, the study boldly says, governments were saving the cost
of health care, pensions and housing for the elderly smokers
who died early.

The cozy tobacco/government relationship only began to come
apart when citizens started winning law suits against
tobacco corporations and when investigators started to
unravel the dark world of corporate tobacco crime.

One investigator was Luk Joosens.  As a trade specialist for
the World Health Organization, he was trying to find out
where all the manufactured cigarettes in the world were
going.   His major concern was that cigarette markets were
shifting from developed nations to third world countries.

Joosens discovered that about one-third of all cigarettes
couldn't be accounted for - - 400 billion were missing.  It
took a team of international investigative reporters years
to unravel the mystery.  

It turned out that billions of cigarettes were being
smuggled into developing countries to avoid taxes and
duties.   Smuggling is also connected to laundering of drug
money - - drug lords bought cigarettes on the black market
with money made from the sale of drugs, then sold them to
third world smokers.  

Tobacco corporations knew exactly where the cigarettes were
going and they had every reason to know who their business
partners were.

Big tobacco was not hesitant about letting governments know
who was in charge.  When federal and provincial Canadian
governments decided to raise taxes on the sale of
cigarettes, effectively reducing sales, tobacco corporations
fought back.  First they increased exports to the U.S.,
which seems odd at first since Americans don't smoke
Canadian cigarettes.

Then the "exported" cigarettes were smuggled back into
Canada.  From U.S. warehouses they were trucked to the
protected Akwesasne Indian reserve that straddles the
U.S.-Canada border.  Mohawk Indians smuggled the cigarettes
back into Canada for sale without tax; undercutting the sale
of legal, taxed tobacco.

The smuggled cigarettes started to eat away the legal
market.  That forced Canadian governments to lower taxes. 
The sale of legal rebounded, which was the desired effect. 
Big tobacco let government know who controlled sales.

Large profits were made by criminal syndicates who
transported and repackaged cigarettes to the Mohawks, so
that they appeared legal to smokers.

Canadian tobacco corporations pleaded innocent of any
involvement with the smuggling scheme but a letter obtained
by a RCMP, from recent raid on Imperial Tobacco, suggests
otherwise.

The letter was written by Imperial Tobacco's president and
CEO Don Brown to the managing director of its parent company
British American Tobacco.  It reads, "Although we agreed to
support the federal government's effort to reduce smuggling
by limiting our exports to the U.S.A., our competitors did
not. Subsequently, we have decided to remove the limits on
our exports to regain our share of Canadian smokers ...
Until the smuggling issue is resolved, an increasing volume
of our domestic sales in Canada will be exported, then
smuggled back for sale here."

U.S. president Reagan once said, "Government is not the
solution, it's the problem."  That's certainly the opinion
of big tobacco, now that governments have been forced to
protect consumers.

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