TORONTO - Teenagers who smoke are increasingly turning to the black market and the Ontario government must act to suppress the growing popularity of contraband cigarettes, a coalition of health groups said Thursday.

The Ontario Campaign for Action on Tobacco estimates more than 60,000 students in the province are puffing contraband cigarettes.

"It's not just from convenience stores," said Michael Perley, director of the group, as he described where teens are buying the cigarettes.

"It's from trunks of cars. It's from backs of vans. It's through parents, through friends. It's really quite astonishing."

A supply line starts from the United States as smugglers bring the cigarettes to Canada, often hiding thousands of them in mattresses. The cigarettes end up in smoke shacks on aboriginal reserves and in convenience stores, said Perley.

Contraband cigarettes include First Nations-made clear plastic bags -- so-called baggies -- of 200 cigarettes or tax-free legal brands made off-reserve.

While it's difficult to measure, Perley said there were about 13.5 billion cigarettes consumed in Ontario in 2008, and about 30 per cent of those were contraband.

The coalition wants the province to prohibit the supply of raw materials to unlicensed cigarette manufacturers. It also wants to see a health-based marking on each cigarette sold in Ontario, such as the toll-free number for a smokers helpline.

"The increasing availability of contraband is undermining doctors' years of work on tobacco control," said Dr. Suzanne Strasberg, president of the Ontario Medical Association.

The group is also calling for additional resources for municipal authorities to make contraband smokes a higher priority for police.

Changes to the provincial quota system, under which products from Canadian tobacco companies are supplied tax-free to First Nations, would also assist in the fight, the groups said. Often, tax-free cigarettes are resold to non-First Nations people from Ontario.

"Saskatchewan has limited the legal brands supplied tax-free to reserves," said Perley. "Ontario must move in the same direction."

But Ontario says it has already clamped down on the sale of illegal smokes, adding convictions under the Tobacco Tax Act have tripled from 2007 to 2009.

This week, the Ministry of Revenue, the RCMP and provincial police announced the Cornwall Regional Task Force, which was set up to deal with contraband cigarette smuggling in the area, would restart.

The task force said it seized 8,500 re-sealable bags of contraband cigarettes from three vehicles Wednesday night near the St. Lawrence River.

Ministry spokeswoman Leslie O'Leary also said in a press release that a working committee with the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers' Marketing Board is monitoring the control, planting, harvesting, distribution and any surplus tobacco.

But Perley said there isn't enough being done, especially as kids start to believe the mythology that surrounds the use of contraband cigarettes -- namely that contraband cigarettes are natural because they don't have additives.

"Well additives don't kill you," said Perley. "Tobacco byproducts, like tar, kill you."

For Salvatore Anania, 18, contraband cigarettes were easy to get and relatively cheap when he was in high school.

"You could get them in most convenience stores," said Anania, a Ryerson University student who has since quit smoking.

In the Niagara region, close to the U.S. border, teenagers know how to access truckloads of the illegal smokes.

"In high school, it was very easy to get your hands on contraband cigarettes," said Emily Butko, a 19-year-old University of Toronto student and member of the Ontario Lung Association.

"Sometimes it just took a couple of phone calls and you would have somebody there dropping off cigarettes out of the back of their car."

It's difficult for a young person to quit smoking when hundreds of cigarettes are readily available for as little as $15 a bag, Butko added.