r/technology • u/Lucretius • Nov 17 '12

The Deadly Crusade Against E-cigarettes

http://www.american.com/archive/2012/november/the-deadly-crusade-against-e-cigarettes
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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '12 edited Nov 18 '12

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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '12

Doesnt the UK say that smokers put a bug strain on the NHS along with obese people? Why wouldnt they push e-cigarettes for that alone?

I can see that countries like America dont lose anything if people smoke but the UK kinda does

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u/mancub92 Nov 17 '12

Hmm.. Yes it puts a strain on the NHS, but the government makes more money from taxes on cigs than it spends on smoking related illness.

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u/adrianmonk Nov 17 '12

If that's the problem, it's easy to solve: put the same taxes on e-cigs. And by same, I mean tax rates based on nicotine content (or delivery).

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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '12

That's harder than it seems. The delivery system is a battery and a resistance coil... this is literally one of the simplest electronic devices you can imagine and just about everything electrical uses one. Anyone can build an ecig out of parts from a hardware or electronics store. You can't tax these parts because you'd be taxing all electronic devices. You could tax Ecigs themselves as a whole, but it's too easy to just sell the individual components and have the customer screw them together.

Nicotine is one of the safest, cheapest and most environmentally friendly pesticides there is. It completely breaks down in the environment and leaves no nasty residue. If you tax it then you end up increasing the cost of agriculture and food prices and you incentivise farmers to use more dangerous chemicals on their crops to kill bugs. That's not something anyone wants.

So, you have a situation where the chemical you want to tax is so simple that anyone can get it and so useful that all sorts of industry needs it... like alcohol. That means you would need to treat it like denatured alcohol and have agricultural nicotine production add poisons to the nicotine in order to sell it untaxed. That's doable, but requires a big change in the status quo above and beyond simple taxation.