The English talk about having their cake and eating it.1 The Welsh talk of having the penny and the bun. Italians, more lyrically, talk of having their lover merry and the bottle still full. All these are metaphors to describe the unattainability of mutually exclusive paths to happiness. The legal reality of the House of Lords, however, is that the Customs and Excise does get both to tax the smuggled cigarettes and to seize them. In R v Smith (David Cadman)2 the House of Lords held that a person who smuggles cigarettes into the country is liable, in addition to whatever punishment is imposed upon conviction, to the forfeiture of the cigarettes and then also to a confiscation order to the value of the unpaid duty. This exercise in judicial overkill raises questions both as to the construction of the relevant legislation (whose re-enactment is, at the time of writing, before Parliament) and some wider questions of principle as to the confiscation legislation. Smith also wrote a further chapter in the judicial saga of the statutory expression 'pecuniary advantage', the problems of which should have ended long ago. It holds, without the matter having been properly argued, that where an order is being made to proceeds of crime in a case where the crime involved the deferral of a debt, the order should be to the value of the whole debt, not just the financial value of the deferral. This drives confiscation law far beyond its original objective in the profits of crime, and leaves the criminal who manages to secure the termination of a debt better placed than the one who only achieves its deferral. In an atmos3phere in which money laundering is blamed for many of the evils of the world, with laws to recover the proceeds of crime are increasingly harsh, such decisions as this at least require scrutiny.