Tobacco Firms Step Up Fight Against Cigarette Smuggling

Labs Examine Fake Smokes; Critics Say Industry Turns Blind Eye to Smuggling of Real Cigarettes

SOUTHAMPTON, England—At a network of high-tech laboratories here, vast machines puff away on uspect cigarettes and electron microscopes peer at packaging, all to fight the flourishing scourge of global tobacco smuggling. Workers at British American Tobacco PLC’s sprawling campus, 75 miles southwest of London, analyze hundreds of thousands of seized cigarettes each year, attempting to keep up with counterfeiters’ increasingly.