Good shit, make them sweat.
Oh no!
Anyways…
The tobacco lobby says boosting taxes on its products will just encourage black market sales and cut national revenue – undermining any attempt to funnel revenue into the bloc’s next long-term budget.
So…they’re straight up admitting that they’re just going to start selling their product under the table, if this passes?
Increase the taxes to kingdom come, both for normal and e-smoking stuff. Make advertising, vending machines, and smoking in public places illegal.
Why e-smoking? Why not just tobacco products?
Because they not just bad for peoples health, they are also a nemesis of the environment.
According to Cancer Research UK, there is no evidence that “passive vaping” has harmful effects. Vaping itself may not be harmless but far less harmful than tobacco products, given that it is just propyleneglycol, flavoring and nicotine. Uncontrolled imports from China may however contain more dangerous chemicals, so I’d advocate being lenient on self-mixing/custom vapes while being far stricter on imports.
Also while I advise against vaping indoors due to possible staining of walls from nicotine and pungent smells that may irritate people, it should still be allowed outside and on personal balconies and terraces.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/smoking-and-cancer/is-vaping-harmful
I don’t mind people around me vaping, but the disposable ecigs are a scourge to the environment and need to be banned.
Absolutely.
Yeah lets check that in 10 years.
Vaping has existed for nearly 20 years now and it has been studied ad nauseam due to the same fears as with smoking. Most research shows that it is far less harmful than smoking if the compounds used remain at propyleneglycol, vegetable glycerine, flavoring and eventually nicotine (as nicotine itself does not cause cancer but is an addictive stimulant). Denying all the evidence is just delusional.
Thank you for your comments. The media and tobaco lobby did a great job to demonize vaping! All to get vaping into the hands of big tobaco which are doing a great job with disposable vapes to demonize it further. Small to medium companies which did a great job with refillable vapes really struggle or are already dead because of that.
We see what it has led to in Germany. Propyleneglycol and vegetable glycerine got the tobacco tax making it prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn’t a manufacturer or wholesaler. Vapeshops now have to sell PG and VG at like 200€ per liter when before tax they cost like 10 to 20€ per liter. If anything, they should have taxed the nicotine shots instead.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4565991/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.7b00710
https://scholar.google.de/scholar?start=20&q=passive+vaping+effects&hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5#d=gs_qabs&t=1750859598694&u=%23p%3DpzVN5DufXgsJ <- This one recommends replacing PG with distilled water and VG to reduce throat irritation in active vapers.
https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-981-16-7680-2_7
These are all the relevant papers I found on passive vaping in the first four pages of research paper search. I got access to like ten sites for research and there used to be a grey area site for accessing and downloading research papers (sort of like torrenting) but that site was taken down two or three years ago.
Most studies say that the health effects of passive vaping are insignificant and significant health problems are mostly found with unregulated throwaway THC vapes. Active vaping is another story and vaping PG at overvoltage with sub-ohm coils can produce formaldehyde and some other toxins. However overvolting a rig will also burn your mouth which is why the instance of producing said toxins is uncommon. More likely is that for active vapers the inhaling resistance of PG vapor may have some pulmonary irritations compared to water or glycerine vapor.
Good.
Ramp those taxes up!
I hope it’s sensible with regards to tobacco derived products (ie nicotine).
I used vaping to quit smoking. And I’m now on the nicotine pouches and have quit vaping.
I know I’m just swapping 1 addiction for another, but each has significantly reduced the risk to me and those around me.But if the pouches do get more expensive, I’m sure there’s some nicorette or some other official/medical nicotine thing I can swap to. I assume they won’t get a tax increase (cause if they do, then the tax is stupid)
That’s very impressive you are quitting. It takes lots of effort to do that. You can keep it up!
I don’t mean this as a judgement. Ideally, wouldn’t you now have preferred if smoking was prohibitively hard to start in the first place?
Oh yeh. I wish smoking was just completely not a thing and never was a thing.
When I started it was very socially acceptable and cheap to smoke.
Then it got less socially acceptable (indoor smoking ban), and a big bump in price. I tried quiting a few times, but I always ended up smoking again.
Somehow, when working hard and under time constraints “going for a smoke break” was an accepted excuse to spend 5 minutes outside. Bonkers.Anyway, a proper vaping setup, making my own vape juice and all that had me forget about cigarettes within a few weeks, and I vaped for 5 years. Maybe 8?
Still had an excuse to go for a break, but I felt so much healthier vaping than I ever did smoking. And I could still sneak a vape indoors if there wasn’t time for me to go outside.Been on the pouches for 1.5 years now.
So yeh, increase the taxes on tobacco. A small bump for vaping nicotine (imo, safer than smoking but not risk free). And ideally no tax increase for nicotine products.
I could see a minor bump in taxes for snus/snuff/chewing tobacco. It’s still a risk to the consumer (because it’s tobacco), but it doesn’t pose a risk to 3rd parties (because it’s not burnt or aerosolised).
I don’t smoke anymore 🚬
At a certain point it just becomes an additional poor person tax.
Tax it enough to offset the additional healthcare costs. Enact strict laws on where and when you may smoke, but not so strict it becomes impossible for a smoker to smoke. Then be done.
I don’t think there’s a person on earth who doesn’t know it’s bad for you. This punitive tax increase after increase is just making people miserable for no reason other than so legislators have something to point at to justify their salaries.
Semi related: I learned recently that there’s no tobacco tax on raw tobacco in the EU. You can buy whole leaves online for like 10€/kg and then turn them into rolling tobacco or snus or snuff or whatever. No additives unless you put them in yourself and you can blend different strains to your personal taste (not that I’m advocating for it but you know, if you’re a tobacco user anyway). It’s not that difficult to do either, plenty of tutorials on youtube.
And pot, too, right?
Right?
Nah, legalize weed, shrooms and coca leaves.
That’s my point, the hypocrisy is deafening.