Half-price cigarettes: the black market gains ground

In France, buying cigarettes at half price has become surprisingly easy. You only have to go down into the métro, push open the door of a corner shop or simply walk along the street to come across packs sold at knock-down prices. The other side of the coin: these are black-market cigarettes, either smuggled or counterfeit. And the phenomenon is reaching an unprecedented scale in the country.

Almost one cigarette in two escapes the legal channel

According to a recent study by the consultancy KPMG, commissioned by the tobacco group Philip Morris International, in 2024 almost one cigarette in two smoked in France was not bought through the official tobacconist network. In concrete terms, 24.7 billion cigarettes out of a total of 49.9 billion consumed last year are said to have been bought outside the legal network, a figure up 13% on 2023. The same report describes it as a historic record: France now ranks first in Europe for the consumption of smuggled or counterfeit cigarettes, accounting on its own for close to half of the European Union’s illegal volumes (18.75 billion illicit cigarettes consumed). This growth in the parallel market has accelerated in recent years. The quantity of cigarettes smoked outside official channels is said to have risen by 60% since 2020, reaching a level never seen before. Put another way, the tobacco “black market” is on the way to becoming almost as large as the legal market in France, a situation without equivalent among Western countries.

Rising prices: fertile ground for smuggling

Cigarettes have never been as expensive in French tobacconists as they are today, and that surge feeds directly into the use of parallel channels. The average price of a pack of 20 cigarettes now exceeds €11 (it is expected to reach €12.50 in 2025), compared with barely €5 twenty years ago. Yet crossing the border is enough to find much lower prices: in Luxembourg a pack costs on average €5.80, some 45% less than in France. In Belgium the pack is around €7.50, and even in the duty-free areas of Andorra or Spain prices remain well below French levels. Faced with such gaps, many smokers look to protect their purchasing power by buying elsewhere, even at the risk of skirting illegality. Philip Morris France, which commissioned the striking study, makes no secret of its position: for the maker of Marlboro, continual increases in tobacco taxes and prices are turning consumers away from official channels and making the parallel market “the norm”. “Adult smokers are not stopping smoking but are getting round the high price of cigarettes”, the company states, attributing the growth of illicit trade to anti-tobacco tax policy. Again according to the KPMG report, 49.4% of the cigarettes consumed in France in 2024 came from abroad or from the black market, compared with “only” 30% in 2020. In short, the company argues, smuggling prospers as the price of the pack rises.

Figures disputed by public health bodies

These alarming estimates are, however, strongly disputed by public health specialists and anti-tobacco authorities. The Alliance contre le tabac (ACT) denounces a biased study “which rests on no scientific methodology” and whose only purpose, in its view, is to “hold back public health policy by claiming that raising taxes would cause the black market to explode”. Official figures do indeed paint a much less bleak picture. According to Santé publique France and the French monitoring centre for drugs and addictive behaviour (OFDT), close to 80% of smokers still buy their cigarettes from a tobacconist, a rate that has been stable for more than ten years. The “parallel market”, which covers both legal purchases abroad within the permitted quotas and illegal purchases, is said in reality to account for between 10% and 20% of total tobacco sales in France, two to four times less than the Philip Morris estimates. The divergence is partly explained by how the perimeter under study is defined. Philip Morris includes in its calculation all cigarette purchases made outside the French domestic network, including cartons legally brought back from abroad by private individuals.

Of the roughly 50% of cigarettes said to be bought outside tobacconists, about 10% correspond to legal cross-border purchases and about 40% to outright smuggling or counterfeiting. In other words, the share of the true black market would be around four cigarettes in ten, a high level certainly, but not entirely unheard of. French customs and the tobacconists’ confederation, for their part, speak of an order of magnitude of 30% to 40% of tobacco consumed coming from parallel channels, a significant proportion, though short of the “one in two” put forward by the KPMG study. Illicit street sales, moreover, remain limited according to the available data. “Purchases in the street or from street sellers do not exceed 1%” of the cigarettes sold over the period 2014-2022, the Alliance contre le tabac points out, drawing on OFDT surveys. The bulk of the parallel trade therefore comes rather from large-scale organised smuggling networks and cross-border purchases than from isolated street sellers. ACT and others also criticise the methodology of the KPMG study, based on collecting empty packs in certain areas, a method they consider opaque and liable to overstate the presence of foreign packs. Lastly, they accuse the tobacco industry of brandishing these figures in order to influence public policy, lobbying to limit the tax rises that reduce their legal sales.

Organised trafficking that worries the authorities

Whatever the case, everyone agrees on one point: contraband cigarette trafficking has reached very high levels in France, and the trend is upward. For tobacconists as for the state, the financial stakes are enormous. The tax shortfall linked to the tobacco black market was put at around €9.5 billion for 2023. That is so much tax missing from public coffers, diverted to illegal channels. Tobacconists themselves are seeing their sales steadily eroded: in twenty years the network has lost close to 10,000 outlets across the country, partly because of this unfair competition from cheap cigarettes sold under the counter. Customs officers carry out roadside checks to intercept consignments of contraband tobacco on French territory. Faced with this situation, the public authorities are stepping up the fight against trafficking. In early June 2025, the interministerial operation Colbert III mobilised close to 14,000 officers (customs officers, police, gendarmes and others) across the country. In the space of a week, this concerted push led to the seizure of 37.5 tonnes of tobacco and cigarettes destined for the French black market. The tally records 157 arrests of suspected traffickers and the administrative closure of 108 businesses caught illegally reselling contraband tobacco.

That last measure illustrates a change in practice: more and more illicit cigarettes circulate through late-night grocers or small complicit businesses, while traditional street selling now accounts for only a modest share of seizures (just 200 kg seized during the operation, out of 37 tonnes). Annual seizures confirm the industrial scale of the phenomenon. Close to 489 tonnes of contraband tobacco were intercepted by customs in 2024 on French soil. That figure, slightly down on 2023 (521 tonnes seized) but still close to the 2022 record, includes around 329 tonnes of manufactured cigarettes and tens of tonnes of roll-your-own tobacco, shisha tobacco and other products. Despite these efforts, France remains a hub: clandestine cigarette factories have even been dismantled on French territory in recent years, a sign that counterfeiting is no longer confined to imports. Customs authorities stress the many-sided and organised nature of these criminal networks, speaking of “poly-criminality”, since illicit cigarette supply chains are often linked to other trafficking (drugs, counterfeit goods of various kinds, illegal immigration and so on). Tobacco trafficking has thus become a major security issue, on a par with other illicit markets, because it feeds well-structured mafia networks.