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What is heroin, you say? Cocaine? Automatic weapons?
Try cigarettes. As Western countries hike taxes higher and higher to try to curb smoking, black-market, dirt-cheap smokes are flooding the markets.
Some are counterfeits, rolled out by the millions in filthy factories literally buried underground in southern China. Some are legit, smuggled from low-tax states such as South Carolina to higher-tax cities such as New York, or from Latin American countries to the U.S.
Check out tomorrow’s New Times for a cover story about Miami’s black-market cigarette trade — and its surprising ties to a deadly European terrorist group. Because Florida’s cigarette taxes will jump to 300 percent beginning tomorrow, experts say underground smokes are set to explode in the Sunshine State.
In the meantime, check out the excellent ongoing investigation into the global black-market cigarette trade by the Center for Public Integrity. The group’s latest report — a rare look into China’s counterfeiting industry — was published just this week.
