Transcript of Illegal cigarettes.
Sandra Sully: Sydney has an underground health crisis on its hands caused by illegal cut price cigarettes. And what's worse, they're being peddled to children. The Health Department is now sounding the alarm bells as they hunt the smugglers. Leticia Marambio reports.
Leticia Marambio: Smoking out dodgy operators, one at a time. There are no health warnings, they're in foreign packaging and there's no way to tell what's really in them.
[Video of health inspectors entering a premises.]
Tobacco inspector: That allows us to enter and inspect your business.
Shop attendant: I don't think you can.
Leticia Marambio: But new powers introduced a year ago mean health inspectors can. We can't show you this man's face but he and his team have been busy.
Tobacco inspector: If we inspect your premises we will seize that product.
Leticia Marambio: The owners of this southwest Sydney shop lost more than 50 thousand dollars worth of tobacco during recent raids.
[Video of inspectors looking through products.]
Tobacco inspector: These boxes here. There's some in there.
Dr Kerry Chant, Chief Health Officer: We know that price very much deters uptake of smoking, but also promotes quit attempts. It's a very important driver. These products are coming in and undercutting that market.
Leticia Marambio: They sell them for around half the price of regular cigarettes and they don't care who's buying.
Tobacco inspector: The larger ones obviously don't seem to have any compunction about hiding the product at all. It's business as usual for those people.
Leticia Marambio: This is one of the first stores raided. Since then inspectors have checked 70 others and seized almost a quarter of a million cigarettes and 24 kilograms of loose leaf tobacco. The sad part is, more than 5 million illegal cigarettes and one ton of loose leaf tobacco were caught at the border last month alone, meaning this problem is a hard one to stub out. Leticia Marambio, 10 Eyewitness News.
