Foreign-brand cigarettes can still be purchased in Pyongyang, despite the country’s strict pandemic border controls, reports NK News.
Photos by NK News show the US cigarette brand Lark, Chinese brand Septwolves White and Japanese brand SevenStars were all on sale in one Pyongyang store. Other photos seen by NK News reveal several 200-count cartons of SevenStars — one of the most popular foreign brands in the DPRK — on offer at another location earlier this summer.
Regular visitors to North Korea said they did not expect to see such tobacco products to be available nearly three years into the pandemic. “I’m honestly surprised to see foreign cigarettes in the country during this time,” said Rowan Beard, a manager with Young Pioneer Tours. “Even during the height of tourism, foreign cigarettes were hard to obtain within the country.”
The photos, taken in spring and early summer, also roughly coincide with Washington’s push at the UN to add tobacco to the list of sanctioned exports to North Korea. The move followed the DPRK’s flurry of missile testing earlier this year, but China and Russia vetoed the new measures, the report said.
While tobacco products are not sanctioned under UN measures, unilateral US and Japanese sanctions prohibit the direct export of products such as Lark and SevenStars to the DPRK.
A spokesperson for Japan Tobacco International (JTI), the manufacturer of SevenStars, told NK News that they are not aware of how their products continue to be shipped to Pyongyang. “JTI does not sell any products in North Korea,” the company’s spokesperson said, adding that it is possible the products in Pyongyang were counterfeited there.
According to 2018 data published by the WHO, about half of all North Korean men smoke, including leader Kim Jong Un who is regularly shown smoking in state media photos and videos.