Butting In

The carton is a currency

A Rumanian lovely at a hotel bar in Bucharest sidled suggestively over to the American tourist. Instead of the usual offer of sexual delights, she cooed a surprising request: "Darling, you buy me a carton of Kents, O.K.?"

American-made Kent cigarettes, in their familiar white package, have become a form of alternative currency in President Nicolae Ceausescu's Socialist Republic. Diplomats and foreign visitors use them as tips or to consummate business as well as sexual deals. Nor do the cigarettes immediately go up in smoke. Instead, they are traded back and forth by Rumanians, who prize them as a luxury item. The street price is three times the $1.10 cost per pack in the special dollar shops run for foreigners. "It's a startling feature of life here," says one Western diplomat. "You can't conduct business without at least having to consider using Kents--not necessarily as payment, but as a lubricant to keep things going smoothly."

The popularity of Kents over all other imported cigarettes has less to do with taste or tar content than with the fact that Brown & Williamson International, which markets Kents abroad, has cornered 90% of the Rumanian cigarette import market. The dollar shop at Bucharest's Intercontinental Hotel is piled high with cartons of Kents, a tantalizing symbol of Western opulence. Among the principal purchasers are Third World students in Rumania, who supplement their meager stipends by buying Kents and trading them for cash. Such traffic, though illegal, is tolerated by the government. After all, bribery has been part of Rumanian life since the country was under the domination of the Ottoman Empire. "We were under many foreign influences," says one bureaucrat. "We learned good things and bad things. From the Turks. From the Byzantines." He pauses and grins. "Even from the Russians."

Kents' purchasing power is high. One diplomat gets excellent refuse removal service for a year by tipping the garbageman with Kents. When a resident foreigner's Rumanian maid asked her employer for a few packs of Kents, she explained that her daughter was preparing to take college entrance exams; the cigarettes might serve to temper the severity of the examiner.

Kents are often used to obtain better and faster treatment at hard-pressed state clinics, where services are supposedly gratis. But bribery always has its risks. A physician informed a patient that he would require several hundred packs of Kents to undertake a complicated course of treatment. The patient worked hard to obtain the requisite cigarettes. When she turned the payoff over to the doctor, he in turn used the Kents to help buy a hard-to-get passport. He then departed the country, leaving his patient untreated--and smoking mad.

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