Or: I’d walk across the 49th Parallel for a Camel…
Meet Canada’s “conservative” government:
…these changes ban the retail sale of cigarettes and little cigars (“cigarillos”) containing certain flavoured additives, particularly sweet flavours that supposedly entice young people to take up smoking. All in all, about 5,000 additives are now illegal.
Some of the 5,000 newly-banned additives are used to sweeten U.S.-made cigarettes like Camels (…) So these foreign cigarettes are now effectively banned in Canada. (…)
As a result, the contraband criminals now have a monopoly on American and international cigarettes, as well as cigarillos.
Another strange aspect of these changes: A Rothmans cigarette plant in Quebec City, which produces cigarettes containing some of the banned substances, is staying open because its products are for export purposes only. A Canadian plant is therefore making cigarettes it can’t even sell in Canada.
Since Monday, at least one tobacco company has reportedly flouted the law by simply removing the filters from the cigarillos and turning them into cigars that weigh slightly more than 1.4 grams.