Smuggling Guilt

So, it's really sad about a once-thriving industry that it has seen its sales figures fall so dramatically of late. As one country after another takes steps to intervene and begin to halt the mendacious sale of cancer-causing agents in the guise of a socially-accepted recreational habit. It began a more than a few decades ago, that governments began to wake up to the reality that their populations were being adversely affected by an epidemic of lung cancer.

And not only were lives being lost long before their due date for expiration, but it was costing governments for medical and health services a whole whack of money to pick up the lamentably-lost pieces. In fact, this was hard decision-making, for government agencies to begin warning people against killing themselves through their recreational habit. Mostly because governments were truly conflicted.

While it was costing society heavily in undue deaths of great proportion and untimeliness, crowding hospitals and demanding a whole lot of medical care, government was also reaping huge taxation benefits, boosting their treasuries. Nothing new about governments being fairly hypocritical when it suits them, but this was such an obvious and egregious waste of lives that their collective conscience triumphed over their collective venality.

And when it became obvious that huge tobacco manufacturers and their helpmates, the advertisers and public relations firms that made their own huge whacks of profits off their common cause, were well aware of the carcinogenic effects of their product, but took cautionary steps to ensure that the data remained safely in-house, all hell broke loose. Governments wagged their weighty fingers of blame and hoisted nasty advertising warning of death on cigarette packages.

Nothing daunted, the hard-core smoking public blithely continues their smoke-filled paradise of relaxed bliss. But a far greater number of people took the cautions seriously, frightened almost-to-death by the spectre of black and diseased lungs, rotten teeth and breath, and above all, early deaths of friends, neighbours - and family members. The secret was out and tobacco the culprit. Government increased taxes to ensure the habit became very expensive, and that too helped.

Mind, Germany has just seen a bit of a set-back, where its judicial system has recently ruled that outlawing cigarette smoking in public is tantamount to human-rights abuse. And in Canada, the extension of smoking rights denials recently imposed on the country's prisons threatened to cause pretty brutal social problems for the incarcerated. But people were being generally reasonable, and smoking in general is in great decline.

To counteract the effect of increased taxes making the once-reasonable habit too expensive for many - particularly the young whom tobacco companies have done their utmost to entice by advertising demonstrating how utterly cool smoking is, especially for young women out to impress by their sophistication - the bright idea of lending themselves to smuggling cigarettes in an in-and-out scheme to avoid paying costly tariffs was undertaken.

And through the sale of illegal cigarettes the big corporations made a financial killing, while their product aided and abetted in the slow and agonizing killing of hopeless morons who celebrated the availability and acquisitionability of cheap smokes. Unfortunately for the big tobacco companies like Imperial Tobacco Canada and Rothmans Inc., smart investigators revealed their complicity in this rather illegal irregularity and government held them accountable.

To the hefty tune of $1.1-billion, to represent, in part, the avoidance of conforming to the Excise Act, and thus withholding taxation monies from government coffers. The companies had exported Canadian brand cigarettes into the U.S. enabling them to be smuggled back into Canada with rigged coded packages that would be untraceable. The contraband market thrived, in the process capturing the market of young smokers with a more affordable product.

The real fly in the ointment of the final resolving of this issue is that somehow, those in the hierarchy of the tobacco industry who were responsible for this illicit decision-making have not been identified and charged.