Heroin cannot be washed away with tobacco.
BAT representatives confirm
Anti-smoking activists in Britain have apparently found a new way to crack down on tobacco users. The multinational company British American Tobacco (BAT) is accused of money laundering, drug trafficking and cigarette smuggling. On Wednesday, a British parliamentary commission was looking into BAT's links to an organized crime group in Colombia. Company representatives called the accusations absurd.

Although the company's management categorically denied all accusations, it does not intend to sue the offenders. The offenders - the director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), which deals with smoking and health issues, Clive Bates and the British journalist Duncan Campbell - spoke at a meeting of the UK Health Committee.
The blow was taken by BAT chairman Martin Broughton and Kenneth Clarke, the former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and former Health Secretary, and now one of the BAT executives, perhaps the most famous person in the company in its entire history.
British American Tobacco has acknowledged that smuggling may have occurred in markets such as Colombia, but its representatives insist that if it did occur, it was without the company's involvement.
However, Bates and Campbell disagree. ASH said in a statement that BAT was "almost certainly" involved in money laundering. The arguments are as follows: the huge supply of cigarettes to Colombia and the so-called Golden Triangle (a drug production area that includes Thailand, Vietnam and some other Asian countries) suggest certain links to the cocaine and heroin trade.
ASH has no direct evidence that BAT employees are involved in the illicit trade, but Campbell and Bates point out that the cigarette trade is often used as a way to launder drug dollars, and note that BAT has special code names for smuggling projects. For example, "Dzheko", "Not-Grass", "Ajax". Campbell then, waving a pack of Bellmont cigarettes, told the crowd: “This was bought on the black market in Bogota, Colombia, three weeks ago!” Broughton called the charges absurd and, to illustrate his comment, with an equally theatrical gesture, took one of the letters presented by Campbell as evidence, and with the words: “If this is your irrefutable proof, then ...” - he tore the letter into small pieces.
Clarke, the MP, said he had carried out a thorough review and could confirm that BAT was clean before the law. At the London office of British American Tobacco, a Kommersant correspondent was told that smuggling has always been and remains a headache for any company, and it is stupid to blame only the tobacco industry for this. In the UK, the illegal trade in cigarettes is much higher than in the rest of Europe, not to mention Colombia, due to high taxes. Naturally, smuggling attracts many organized crime groups looking to launder money from the drug trade. “It’s just not clear what British American Tobacco has to do with it,” the BAT office is perplexed.
LOVE J-GRAKHOV

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 27 dated 02/18/2000, p. 9