Blog 5
Matthew Beasley
The Criminal side of
Tobacco
This week in our Sociology
class I learned that one of organized crimes main goals is to provide
goods that cannot be obtain legally or that can produced illegally
(fake Rolex) and still be able to make a profit from it. With laws
that are beginning to spread around the globe to curb smoking habits,
I came across this article and at first was glad to see laws passed
to remove branding from cigarette packs. Plain packing as it is
called is an attempt to removing branding from the packing of
cigarettes and is an effort to remove some of the cool factor that
cigarettes can obtain from its brands, camel brand and its Camel Joe
logo is one that I have seen all my life. This seems like a great
step at removing images from children's view that attract them to
smoking. Now though in Australia where this law has taken affect,
tobacco companies are claiming that this plain packing of cigarettes
has only opened the flood gates for illegal smokes to fill the
marketplace. Organized crime and other criminals have seized this
opportunity by importing a great deal of illicit smokes.
Surprisingly, Australia has
the biggest smoking population of anywhere in the Asian Pacific
market and they have now seen an increase in illegal tobacco by more
than 30%. The fact that the logos are removed seems to make it very
easy to pass off a illegal unregulated cigarette, right along with a
legal one. There has to be some legitimacy to this claim as customs
agents have detected an increase in illegal tobacco from around 80
million to more than 141 million illegal cigarettes in just the
single year of 2011-2012. This shows the global nature of of how
criminals will find the gap where illegal activity can take place and
then exploit it for as long as they can. As we learned from the Ted
talks in class, organized crime is now up to 15% of the total global
GDP.
With such an increase
detected by officials one can only assume that the number of
cigarettes that the customs officials did not detect is at least on
par, and likely way more than what the officials caught. As bad as
tobacco is, I would personally prefer to have regulated brands being
sold than cigarettes that are unregulated. Things that are made
without regulation, typically do not have the standards of regulated
items, and who knows what a criminal will put in a cigarette as a
filler substance so they can increase their profits even further.
Admittedly part of me does question some of this information (as
Sociology has taught me to question all that I read), and I do I
wonder if this is an effort to bring back labeling by tobacco
companies, because as they claim; the volume of smoking is staying
the same, it is only the illegal numbers that are making their
regulated numbers decline.
