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Cigarette Trafficking and Traffickers in the Netherlands(1) |
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by Maarten van Dijck
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Excise laws are known since the Middle Ages. In those times, cities constituted what we nowadays call emerging markets. Already in 1274 Dutch cities acknowledged the benefits of levying taxes on certain luxury goods, such as salt and sugar (van der Poel 1928). Ever since the existence of duties black and grey economies have emerged; not paying taxes means a further reduction of costs, which gives the duty-evading smuggler2 a competitive edge over his law-abiding and tax-paying counterpart. In addition, the contemporary ongoing increase in tobacco excise, used by the European governments to curb the unhealthy addiction of smoking, has a criminogenic side effect: to maintain their bad smoking habit, an increasing number of people, instead of quitting smoking, resort to the cheaper duty non-paid cigarettes, some of them starting bootlegging cigarettes themselves.
This paper sets out to describe some of the findings of a cigarette case study, which was conducted as part of the research project Assessing Organised Crime in 2005 and 2006. It focuses on subjects involved in cigarette smuggling in the Netherlands. The 43 cases studied for this purpose may not provide a picture that is fully representative of the overall population of cigarette smugglers in the Netherlands. After all, studying customs files inherently implies a number of biases. Nevertheless, the findings presented in this paper provide a description of how cigarette trafficking is organised in various ways and by whom. |
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Trafficking 
