Cigarettes news

Contraband easy to buy, put in the mail

OTTAWA — The Chronicle Herald purchased a 200-cigarette baggie of Kahnawake brown tips as a research aide for this article at L&M Discounts, a tobacco shop on the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, for $15 — about $5 more than the going rate because we didn’t want to haggle and the proprietor had obligingly posed for some photos.

The cigarettes then travelled back to Ottawa to our correspondent’s home, where a friend of the correspondent smoked one and reported it foul.

The Chronicle Herald photo department required contraband cigarettes for illustration purposes, so our correspondent took them to the postal outlet on Parliament Hill, where a worker raised his eyebrow but put the baggie in a courier envelope and charged the paper $15.47 for overnight delivery to our office in Halifax.

There, Herald photographers took some shots and the contraband was handed off to a senior editor for disposal.