Canadian officials are bedeviled by an increase in the quantity of cigarettes being smuggled into their country over its border with the United States. They are concerned because there is very little they can do to stop it.

The smuggling problem is out of control, according to Walter Wafer, a senior official with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who, in administrative despair, points to the cross section of Canadians who are engaged in the practice. Their diversity and persistence has made border enforcement almost impossible.

In a special report to the NEWS, Ross Ingram relates from Fredericton that the individuals who have been involved in the underground trade range from a 77-year-old woman who supplies her bridge club with American cigarettes, a physician who feeds the nicotine addiction of his hospital colleagues in Montreal, and a Canadian couple who make their weekly gas money marking up duty-free cigarettes bought in the United States.

Cumulatively, such people, like the tourists who smuggle an occasional bottle of liquor across the border, represent a significant loss to their national economies. Practically, however, governments have neither the work force nor the will to shake down every border transient to confiscate a few shots of alcohol or a carton of cigarettes. But there is a need to make the mesh in the net larger to catch or deter the big-time operators.

What complicates the lives of Canadian border officials today is that each package of smuggled cigarettes produces double jeopardy on their side of the border: The government loses $3.60 in tax revenue that would have supported the national health-care system, and the people on the filtered end of the contraband get sicker and add to the health-care bill.

Americans shouldn’t snicker at the predicament of their northern cousins. What is occurring in Canada — the proliferation of black market smokes — already is a problem in this country, where cigarettes have been hijacked by the truckload, and it will get worse here, just as it has up north.

Taxes on cigarettes will continue to increase across the United States as federal and state governments exploit convenient ways to finance health care. U.S. taxpayers, meanwhile, eventually will demand an end to the preposterous federal policy of using tax money and the tax system to subsidize the growing, storing and manufacture of cigarettes.

Both these developments will increase the price per pack. As over-the-counter costs soar, so will the profit incentive in the black market.

Rather than look the other way from what today is erroneously believed to be Canada’s problem, the U.S. government should cooperate with the Canadian government in an effort to get what is potentially a serious criminal matter under control.