Smokes Schemes : Some would rather risk arrest than pay Canada’s super tax on cigarettes. They suggle in cheaper U.S. tobacco in kayaks, frozen turkeys, car seats . . .

TORONTO —  Welcome to Canada, where “cold turkey” has taken on a sensational new meaning for hard-pressed cigarette smokers.

The Canadian government has taxed cigarettes to such levels that smokers have lately been known to drive across the border to the United States, buy a turkey, rip out its frozen innards in the supermarket parking lot, stuff the cavity with cheap American loose tobacco, and smuggle the bird back home.

A Canadian who gets away with this little adventure in the embalming arts can save at least $50 over the Canadian loose-tobacco price, depending on how much “stuffing” the turkey can hold.

“Of course, they’re still supposed to declare the turkey,” says Inspector Rod Smith of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s top law-enforcement agency, which is up to its stirrups in cigarette-smuggling cases these days.

Back in the early 1970s, the United States and Canada taxed cigarettes at roughly comparable rates: Canada levied 26 cents per 20 cigarettes in 1970, while America took in 17 cents.

Since that time, though, Canada’s anti-smoking lobby has seized the day--and government policy-makers’ ears. The federal and provincial governments now collect, on average, $3.23 per pack of cigarettes, while Washington and the states are still taking in a measly average of 44 cents. (In California, smokers pay a 55-cent tax on each pack--20 cents to the federal government and 35 cents to the state.)

Now, the after-tax price for a pack in some Canadian provinces runs more than $7. Only Norwegian and Danish tobacconists charge more at the retail counter, market researchers say.

These exceptional prices delight militant nonsmokers, who say the cost of cigarettes is giving Canada the highest quit-smoking rate of any country. Health groups here say smoking will decline 11% per capita this year; the previous record was a 10% decline posted by New Zealand in 1989.

But cigarettes’ costliness also has provoked some peculiar responses on the part of Canadians unwilling or unable to do without their daily nicotine fix.

“It’s turning ordinary Canadians into criminals,” complains Philip Gillies, president of the Smokers’ Freedom Society, a lobby group funded in good measure by the tobacco industry. “People who wouldn’t think about breaking any other law will routinely smuggle or purchase illegal cigarettes.”

Canadian customs investigator Lee Murphy adds: “Unfortunately, they’re getting criminal records, which will stay with them for the rest of their lives.”

That’s what happened to Christian Vandermaas, a 31-year-old Ontario kayaker who braved the raging currents of the Niagara River to smuggle $15-a-carton American smokes into Ontario, where he planned to resell them for about $40 per carton. He paddled the distance without incident but was busted at the shoreline by police, who found 50 cartons of cigarettes in his kayak and 100 more in his car. An Ontario judge fined Vandermaas the Canadian equivalent of $3,480 and sentenced him to six months’ probation.

Then there was the unidentified man who pulled up to the Canadian customs booth at the international bridge in Niagara Falls, got a cheery wave-through from the inspector and headed innocently for a line of tollbooths about 500 yards away. Before he had cleared the toll plaza, his engine burst into flames.

“Somebody yelled, ‘Oh, this guy’s got a fire under his hood! Let’s take the extinguisher out and help the poor man,’ ” recalls Lorraine Spencer, chief of operations at the crossing. “When they popped the hood, they found something like 48 cartons of cigarettes in there. That was why it caught fire--he had them packed in there so tightly that the air couldn’t circulate and the engine overheated.” The man’s car was seized.

Lately, Canadian customs inspectors have been finding loose tobacco hidden under car seats, inside rear bumpers, in the side walls of vans--”it just depends on people’s imagination,” says Murphy, who recently found a cache in emptied boxes of breakfast cereal.

Determined Canadian smokers often try unscrewing their car-door panels and stuffing the space inside with cigarettes. But customs inspectors are wise to the practice; they know a driver with stuffed doors can’t roll down his windows and get suspicious when they see travelers steaming along in closed cars on hot summer days.

The Mounties estimate cigarette-smuggling nationwide to be a $435-million-a-year business--and growing. Inspector Smith, the force’s assistant criminal operations officer for the New Brunswick province, says his unit expects to handle eight times as many cigarette seizures by the end of this year as it did in 1990.

Even for the little guy, the economics of cigarette taxation in Canada today make smuggling nearly irresistible. In the United States, says Smith, an imported pack of Canadian cigarettes may sell for $2; the same pack could go for $5 more in Canada. (Canadian smugglers almost always conduct their trade with Canadian cigarettes because Canadian customers, accustomed to pure flue-cured tobacco, generally dislike the taste of blended American brands.)

“People start out smuggling for themselves, but when they see the amount of profit that’s in it, it becomes very tempting to free-lance,” says Murphy.

Indeed, multiply the by-the-pack numbers into cartons and cases, and a more lurid picture develops. In Montreal, authorities recently busted a variety of smugglers hauling cigarettes in batches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each. The Mounties say organized crime is involved.

“We’ve even heard stories that some former cocaine and hashish dealers are kicking over and turning to cigarette smuggling,” says Gillies, the pro-smoking lobbyist. “There’s more money in it, for one thing. And everybody hates the drug dealer, but nobody hates the cigarette dealer, so you can go from the neighborhood pariah to everybody’s buddy overnight.”

Some of the large-scale smuggling rings are so well-organized that they have secret phone numbers that ring pagers. “You leave your address on the pager, and you can have cigarettes delivered by the carton to your residence,” says Gillies. “It’s really quite strange.”

Strange--and ominous. In Quebec, cigarette smuggling has fueled the rise of the Mohawk Warriors, a radical, paramilitary North American Indian group that claims to promote a return to pre-Columbian traditions but sports illegal high-powered weapons to enforce its views.

It was the Mohawk Warriors who made headlines last summer with a bloody, weeks-long standoff with police and soldiers at a contested golf-course development just outside Montreal.

The Canadian army said at the time that the Warriors were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, Uzi submachine guns, M-16s and other heavy weapons. The group got the money to buy the guns, in large part, through cigarette smuggling.

Until recently, a Montreal smoker looking to beat the tax man could drive to the nearest Mohawk reservation and take his pick of more than 60 cut-rate cigarette retailers operating out of trailers along the road. When the golf-course violence flared, the most blatant smugglers went underground, but authorities say they are carrying on.

Canada’s problem with cigarette smuggling draws nods of sympathy from California tax officials, who say they, too, have a major concern with illegal cigarettes--only in California, they say, the problem is Mexican cigarettes. While Canadian smugglers on the northern border are busily carrying cigarettes out of the United States, their counterparts on the southern border are just as busy ferrying untaxed Mexican cigarettes in.

How did things come to such a pass in Canada? Much of the credit--or blame, if you’re a smoker or a Mountie--can be laid on the formidable Canadian anti-smoking lobby.

Until about 1985, says David Sweanor, legal counsel for the Non-Smokers’ Rights Assn., groups like his would simply pass smoking-is-bad resolutions at their annual conventions and mail them to the Canadian health ministry. The letters were utterly ineffective; health officials would file them, Sweanor says, then go off to well-organized, high-pressure meetings with tobacco-industry lobbyists.

“The tobacco lobby was really carrying the day--just like what’s happening today in the United States,” he says.

Eventually, says Sweanor, the health groups wised up and took a technical, economic tack. They would analyze, say, the way changing cigarette prices affected consumption, or study the complex relationship between farm-price subsidies and tobacco-tax revenues.

When the health groups then took their findings to federal and provincial tax bureaucrats, he says, the fiscal experts received them with open arms.

“The initial reaction was, ‘Thank God you’re here,’ ” he says. Once the government tax men were convinced they couldn’t worsen Canada’s budget deficit by tampering with the cigarette-tax structure, he says, it was relatively easy to convince their political masters that raising taxes in the name of public health would make them look good.

For the United States to catch up with the Canadians now, Sweanor says, Washington and the states would have to raise cigarette prices by 30% each year for four years. Doing that could reduce smoking in the United States by 40%, he says.

It also would help Canada, for if America raised its cigarette prices to Canadian levels, then Canadian smugglers would have nowhere to buy their cheap cigarettes.

Of course, they could always go the route of Ray Batenchuk, an amateur horticulturist in Winnipeg. A couple years ago, on a whim, he ordered some tobacco seeds from a catalogue; not only were they easy to grow, he discovered, but also the mature plants released their seed on the winds, and the following spring a volunteer crop of the weed sprang up--like weeds--all over his yard.

Batenchuk knew a good thing when he saw it. He sprouted more tobacco seedlings in peat pots and carted the 4-inch plants to a roadside farmers’ market. There, he sold them for 50 cents each and made a tidy profit.

Customers worried the plants might be hard to grow, but Batenchuk explained that tobacco is kin to the easy-to-grow tomato and that all a fledgling planter had to do was put the plants in the ground, harvest them when they were 6 feet tall, hang them upside down in the sun for a while and roll their own cigarettes on the cheap.

South of the border, Batenchuk’s scheme may evoke memories of the bitter, green cannabis that do-it-yourselfers used to grow on their back porches in the 1960s. But Canada’s grow-your-own-tobacco entrepreneur says he has received nothing but praise.

“Some people have even told me their own recipes for curing it,” he says. “One fellow told me after he had it cured, he would put it in a colander and place it over a pan of water with some molasses in it, on the stove. He turned on the stove and let the vapors run through the tobacco. He thought that was real good tobacco--the best he’d ever smoked.”

Staff writer Virginia Ellis, in Sacramento, contributed to this story.