RNZ investigation finds uranium, lead in black-market tobacco

Black-market cigarettes sold in Auckland have even more harmful chemicals than regular smokes, including higher levels of uranium, RNZ has found.

RNZ has been investigating the illicit smokes, sold over the counter at prices well below retail value and without any of the health warnings or Quitline numbers required by law, for the past three months.

Without regulation, the quality of the tobacco is dubious, and lab testing has revealed the extent of the danger.

RNZ brought specialists at the University of Auckland three samples of cigarettes: a legitimate packet of Chesterfield Blue covered in the health warnings and Quitline information required by law; and two black-market smokes, a packet of Double Happiness and a packet of Hongtashan 1956 cigarettes.

By law, cigarettes have to include pictures and health warnings covering at least 75 percent of the front of the packs. But the cigarettes being sold on the black market are a throwback to the 1990s of glossy, embossed packaging and no ugly health warnings or images.

Organic and medicinal chemistry professor David Barker agreed to analyse the sample cigarettes.

"In the Double Happiness I was actually really surprised - there were lots of kind of unusual metals that you wouldn't expect to find in plants," he said.

"There was high levels of tin, indium, caesium and even uranium, which I was actually really surprised [by] - that wasn't found in the other two cigarettes at all."

"The [Hongtashan] had antimony, lead - we all know how bad lead is - and bismuth," Barker said.

The Hongtashan had roughly 40 percent more lead than the legitimate smokes, 1013 micrograms per litre compared to 722.

Hongtashan and Double Happiness both contained cadmium at levels up to 60 percent higher than the legitimate counterpart. The highly carcinogenic metal was found in virtually all smokes.

"It just shows that the soil that they were grown in wasn't the cleanest soil," Barker said.

Tobacco was known to absorb metals from the soil and could be used to extract metals when planted in contaminated fields, he said.

Double Happiness was also found to contain 90.8 micrograms of uranium per litre, more than double that of either of the other samples and more still than both of them combined.

That was particularly concerning for University of Canterbury emeritus professor of toxicology Ian Shaw.

"That's the one that would give me some degree of worry," he said.

"As you know, uranium is radioactive and it's highly insoluble, and it forms a dust very easily."

Shaw said if uranium was present in the cigarettes, those smoking them would be inhaling the uranium dust.

"It will sit in their lungs and it will sit there for a long time and all the time it's sitting there it's basically irradiating the cells," he said.

Whether the uranium levels were significant compared with the carcinogens already in cigarette smoke was unclear.

More samples would be needed to determine just how much worse the black-market cigarettes were, Shaw said.

But he said the risks were already there when smoking cigarettes.

"Cadmium is carcinogenic, that's well known as well, and when it gets into the lungs it will just sit there," he said.

"It may get taken up by the lung cells and may exert its effects in the lungs but it's not possible to know how much this increased concentration will increase the risk, except that it will increase the risk."

At the University of Auckland's Centre for Electron Microscopy and Material Science, researchers Catherine Hobbis and Mahyar Afshar Mohajer were able to identify the elemental make-up of the cigarettes by zooming into the tobacco leaves and analysing the material.

"We saw calcium, we saw potassium, and in the ash sample in particular we saw significant amounts of phosphorus as well," Hobbis said.

"They're all indicative of fertiliser and ground material."

Supply concerns ministry

Both the black-market packs RNZ obtained were priced at a fraction of retail value, with one as cheap as $15.

Importing cigarettes without paying the excise duty is illegal, as is selling illicit smokes, and offenders can face a fine or prison time.

The Ministry of Health told RNZ it remained concerned about the supply of illicit tobacco and was working with partners across government on strengthening action to prevent the illicit tobacco trade.

Speaking to reporters on the government action group's first sting, Health NZ's Jo Pugh said their focus was on the community harm caused by illicit tobacco.

"Illicit tobacco is unregulated - we don't know what materials are actually in the products that they're selling - and it's untaxed, and it's sold at a much lower price," she said.

"That really undermines those efforts that everyone is taking to reduce our smoking in this country as well."

The action group seized $170,000 cash in addition to the black-market smokes.

It was estimated the 1.3 million cigarettes seized by the group represented more than $2 million in evaded tobacco excise.