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- Tobacco smoking
- adolescent
- prevention and control
- legislation and jurisprudence
- Ontario
- Canada
- public policy
- smuggling
- surveillance and monitoring
- tobacco products
- young adults
The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) states that the elimination of illicit trade in tobacco is an essential component of tobacco control.1 Contraband tobacco may be particularly attractive to adolescent smokers, owing to its lower price and lack of point-of-sale age restrictions. At this time, however, little is known about youth involvement in the illicit tobacco trade.
According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,2 the bulk of the Canadian contraband tobacco supply comprises cheap, untaxed cigarettes manufactured on, and smuggled from, the US side of the Akwesasne First Nations/Native (American Indian) community, which straddles the US-Canada border across regions in upper New York State, Ontario and Quebec. The Canadian tobacco black market is also supplied by manufacturing facilities in Canada, however, as well as by other sources.2
The present study aims to assess the usage prevalence and market share of reserve-manufactured contraband cigarettes, commonly known as Native cigarettes, among high school daily smokers in Ontario, Canada. Data came from the 2009 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS),3 a provincially representative, school-based survey of …
Footnotes
Funding This research was supported by an institutional grant from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the Ministry.
Competing interests None.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.