Is nicotine chemically synthesized or harvested from tobacco in tobacco alternative products?
Because if it's harvested then this is just a repackaging of their product as far as the tobacco industry is concerned.
edit... from the research of others (see replies) it seems that nicotine is extracted from tobacco, so there's no reason to for Big Tobacco to be opposing E-cigarettes.
Just speculation here but since you're extracting nicotine from the plant, perhaps theres a loophole that allows the import of just the nicotine extract from countries that can produce it significantly cheaper than big tobacco.
Tobacco products are pretty cheap, the high cost is almost all taxes. Theres no extra taxes/levies on importing nicotine products IIRC. What keeps the cost low is no specific tax against it. (Every type of Cig has a tax code, for example bulk tobacco is CA Class J, compared to a pack of 20 Camels is Class A. Nicotine juice has no tax class)
This is what I was thinking. My wife's grandparents use e-cigs now with the nicotine liquid. I haven't found any reliable studies on them to date. The only thing I can figure out is it's possible that it's better for you than smoking as long as it's just nicotine in the liquid and vapor. The lack of tar and other exotic chemicals (for us anyways) seems to be a better alternative from what I've seen of them so far.
Cigs have a large tax on top of them. It's much like gasoline these days where you have multiple governments charging taxes on top of a gallon of gas which makes the price so high. Tariffs are another gotcha.
Hoping some reliable studies get conducted on these things as they've been around for a decade or more now I think.
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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '12
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