- 36p for a 10-hour day*, not bad for a twelve year old
- I spend £2.38 a month on tobacco - a quarter of what I earn
- Don’t feed the world, get it to smoke.
- Can’t see the wood for the weed
- The wrong kind of trees.
- Tobacco’s sensitive, just like our ozone layer.
- Green with nausea, dizziness and stomach cramps
FACT AND FIGURES
The dangers of fake cigarettes.
Many may be fake, but the ill effects are real enough
In Camden it’s easy to find fake cigarettes, cheap copies of known brands often masterminded by criminal gangs. 1 In 2003-4 54% of tobacco seized by Customs was fake, predominantly from the Far East and China CMO report. We buy these cigarettes from illegal street sellers, but along with the cut price we also get 3 times more arsenic, 6 times more lead, 160% more tar and 133% more carbon monoxide. Lovely. We may even get animal droppings thrown in too. It’s hard to tell fake from genuine - until we try to smoke one.
With smuggled cigarettes we may think that we’re getting the real thing, just cheaper, but we’re breaking the law, undermining our own health service by avoiding paying our taxes, and we're lining criminals’ pockets.
When it comes down to it, whether shop bought, smuggled or "fake" cigarettes they're all hurting our health and if others are breathing our smoke, we are hurting them too.
- 1. Ashes to Ashes, Annual Public Health Report, Camden PCT (2007)