There's a significant difference between busting people for dropping acid or growing some weed in their backyard and busting people for trafficking large amounts of cocaine on behalf of an international drug cartel.
Yet is there an international, violent, criminal cigarette mafia? No. It's the level of Canadians not declaring their cheaper shopping goods from the USA when they cross the border to avoid tax.
It's nowhere near as serious as the Mexican Narco gangs. No one is being dissolved in vats of lye for smuggled cigarettes.
But it is more serious than Joe Sixpack bringing in a few extra undeclared bottles of whisky.
Cigarettes are legal and regulated, but high tax, and it is the high tax that causes smuggling and counterfeiting.
Real cigarettes used to be exported from the UK, (thus avoiding UK duties) and then smuggled back in (again, to avoid the duty). The outward flow was stopped, but that means that counterfeiters stepped in. Now there's a more dangerous product, with less regulation, being smuggled in to the UK. Criminal gangs are involved in the production and distribution of counterfeit cigarettes. Raids on distribution find amounts in the order of ten million cigarettes. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-20297912)
Oil is different in that it is not something one produces, but rather something that one simply finds. Drugs are produced by farming or chemical processes (or some combination), and most popular drugs can be produced at very low cost.
