A Day in the Life with Cigarettes

By Mia Silverman

Disclaimer:

The characters introduced in the following stories are fictional. The anecdotes presented are a fictional depiction of two different sides of an illicit cigarette market, supported by facts that have been thoroughly researched.

Prologue

Tobacco use is a long-standing epidemic, with around 1.3 billion smokers globally^[1]. Smoking kills over 8 million people a year, and Greece is a country acquainted with both the health dangers of cigarettes as well as the economic ups and downs this product carries with it. Greece has one of the highest per-capita smoking rates among the EU member states. While the number is dropping, rates are still colossal, and the rise of federal taxes on tobacco has not done much to deter citizens from smoking, and worse, taxes may in part be responsible for pushing people towards illicit markets to satisfy their needs.

Wednesday, July 14th

Nicholas and Michalis

5:45 a.m.– Nicholas’s alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. It’s an earlier morning than usual, but he needs to head to Piraeus^[2] port right outside of Athens to get the new shipments in.

6:15 a.m.– When Nicholas arrives at the port and walks up to the usual boat, he notices an extra guy on board, one he has never seen before. As he greets the regulars, the last man introduces himself as Michalis and says he’s tagging along today. Always happy to get a younger guy to do the heavy lifting, Nicholas directs Michalis to the boxes at the bottom of the boat. Before they start unloading, Nicholas peeks into the top box to double-check the product. Everything looks good. 20 boxes full of white cigarette packs from Bulgaria^[3].

7:00 a.m.– All of the boxes are unloaded and put into Nicholas’ truck. Nicholas and Michalis head into the city to start their route. Michalis pulls out one of the packs of white cigarettes and offers Nicholas one. Nicholas declines and says, “Those things will kill you, ya know.”

8:00 a.m.– The first couple of stops in the morning were to local people trying to make a buck or two. All were close with Nicholas, exchanging pleasantries while exchanging money for illegal goods. Michalis wonders why these normal people would need to buy these cigarettes instead of the ones sold legally in convenience stores. Nicholas tells him that it’s something to do with increased federal taxes. Greece is a poor country with both smoking and unemployment problems. He heard on TV the other day that unemployment has averaged around 11.5% for twenty years^[4]. How are tobacco addictions satisfied while keeping prices relatively low? It’s done by looping locals into reselling smuggled cigarettes.

9:00 a.m.– Half of the boxes have been unloaded to local resellers when the van is stopped by a beat cop. Michalis is shaking and worried about being arrested (it’s his first day on the job). Nicholas rolls his eyes and steps out of the van, shaking hands with the officer. After a few minutes of back and forth, a 50-dollar bill, and ten cigarette packs, Nicholas hops back in the car and continues on their route.

Noon– At lunch, Michalis asks about the interaction with the cop. He wants to know why they didn’t get busted. Nicholas explains that for the deputy, there’s a lot of money to be made from bribes. Plus, Nicholas has been working in Athens for a long time. The cops are serious about counterfeit cigarettes^[5] only because of the unregulated manufacturing methods, and technically the ones in the back of his van were legitimately manufactured. They just happened to be smuggled into Greece.

2:00 p.m.– Back in the center city, the men pick up another load of cigarettes. This time they drive them out of Athens to get sent off to neighboring countries. Lots of money is made by selling goods to other countries that don’t have the same kind of access to cigarettes ^[6], especially when there packs cost so much more. For example, Greece has access to hard packs of Marlboros, for much less than northern Europe ^[7]. That means that if bootleggers can carry packs from Greece, they can make some nice profits travelling north.

6:00 p.m.– Once all of the daily deliveries are made, Nicholas has to bring his profits back into Athens to be collected. There is a lot of money to be made in smuggling and bootlegging because tobacco addictions are huge in Greece. The government has tried to cut down on cigarette purchases by increasing the federal tax per pack, but that only benefits smugglers more. Passing the government buildings not far from his home, Nicholas tips his hat towards the officials working inside, thanking them for putting more money into his pocket.

Alexander and Zoe

5:45 a.m.– Alexander Callas’ alarm sets off at 5:45, as it does every other day of the week. He gets dressed and heads out the door on his way to work. While he walks to the metro, he stops by coffee shops and picks up a pastry, coffee, and today’s copy of the Ta Nea newspaper^[8].

6:45 a.m.– Sitting down on the metro, Alexander notices the headline on the front page of Ta Nea: “Cigarettes are Greece’s Favorite Pastime” and glances at the story below. In a new study, it is found that 41% of Greece’s adult population smokes. Even worse, around 45.5% percent of Greek youth has admitted to smoking^[9]. Alexander rubs his head in frustration as he braces himself for today’s tobacco conversation.

7:30 a.m.– As Alex walks into work at the office of the Government Spokesperson Stelios Petsas^[10], questions go flying around about what the government is going to do about smoking in Greece. Alexander walks out of the craziness and up to his research assistant Zoe’s desk and lets her know that he’s figured out what her project of the day is. He starts rattling off questions about how often Greek people smoke, whether or not the government is getting a lot of money from the sale of cigarettes, and what the government can do to cut down on smoking in general.

9:00 a.m.– The first question Zoe was asked was “how much do Greek people smoke?” Through her research, she found that in 2012, about 19,400 million tons of cigarettes were manufactured in Greece. She knocks on Alexander’s office door and when she’s ushered in, lets him know in addition to the high production of cigarettes, on average about ten cigarettes a day are smoked by Greek men and about five a day are smoked by Greek women^[11]. “Meaning on average around 70 cigarettes are smoked by men and 35 by women a week,” Zoe says at the end of her synopsis.

Alexander thinks back to his mother’s smoking habits, and when it came down to it, he remembers her smoking throughout the day. She would usually smoke in the early morning, then next around lunch, one while making dinner, and then one before bed. Zoe notices that Alexander has drifted into thought and clears her throat before saying “That was what I could find so far about how often our citizens smoke, but I am having trouble finding more on the tax statistics. Do you have any suggestions?” Alex snaps out of his daydream and tells Zoe that he knows someone at the Ministry of Finance that could help them out.

Noon– While eating lunch in the break room, a couple of reports from the Ministry of Finance show up. Alexander flips through a few pages and finds some interesting facts about how much the government gets from every pack of cigarettes. They showed that since 2019, a 20-cigarette pack costs around five dollars, or $4.93 to be exact. Taxes on the pack made up about $4.18 of that cost, around 84.8% of the total cost^[12]. Once he finishes his lunch, Alexander brings the reports over to Zoe and lets her know what he found in them. “Do these numbers surprise you?” he asks her. She responds by chuckling a bit and saying “Did you ever have to buy cigarettes for your parents? I would buy them from the shop under our apartment three times a week, I could have told you that a pack cost $20. It just shocks me that so much of that price is from federal taxes.”

3:00 p.m.– In mid-afternoon, Alexander finds himself thinking back to when he was younger. He had forgotten about going down to the corner store and grab his mother two packs of cigarettes every week until Zoe mentioned it. His mom would send him with $10 and she always let him get a piece of gum with the extra change. He remembered how excited he would be when she asked him to go down there. When he thinks about it now, that’s a lot of money to spend a month, money that they didn’t always have to spare. However, if people are addicted to tobacco, they aren’t always able to just stop smoking if they can’t afford it. How could they get their fix if they couldn’t spend over $30 a month on legal cigarettes? There must be some underground cigarette sellers that people with addictions could turn to if they didn’t have extra money to spare. With this thought in mind, Alexander asks Zoe to find some facts about the illicit sale of cigarettes in Greece and bring them back to him before the end of the day.

5:00 p.m.– Around 5, Zoe walks back into Alexander’s office and presents him with a 2019 study done by Philip Morris International. He looks up at her in the doorway. “Go ahead then, what does it say?” he asks. Zoe looks back down at her notes and tells him about how this study covers the illicit cigarette trade in the EU. Knowing he asked for specific information concerning Greece’s problems, she quickly adds: “of the 15.3 billion cigarettes smoked by Greeks in 2019, 3.4 billion are counterfeit cigarettes or cigarettes that are legal in other countries but are smuggled illegally into Greece”^[13]. After a couple of seconds of silence, Alexander smiles, nods approvingly, and asks Zoe to print out the Greece section before she heads out for the night.

6:00 p.m.– With the report in hand, Alexander packs up his things and locks up the office. “Great work today!” he says to Zoe as he leaves. While walking out the front doors of the office, and reminiscing about his younger days with his mom, a man catches Alexander’s eye. The man tipped his hat in the direction of Alexander and kept walking. “Strange,” thought Alex, as he continued his way back home.

One thought kept bugging him on his commute. He wondered what more the government could do to stop people from smoking, especially since the high taxes don’t seem to be very effective in stopping tobacco use. Further than that, Alexander wondered whether or not the government should keep these taxes so high, especially if people will just turn to black markets instead. “Just another question to keep me up at night,” Alexander thinks as he boards the metro that will take him back home.

Epilogue

In Greece, between $740 million and $781 million in tax dollars have been lost due to the illicit trade of cigarettes^[14]. Greece is a country that is already facing huge amounts of economic turmoil, and black-market cigarettes are only putting the country in a deeper hole. With many different tactics for bringing in these illicit goods, complacency from local officers, and ineffective tax increases, it is hard to see light at the end of the tunnel for Greece without some major structural change to address these issues.