Honestly, I’d be okay with this if in exchange they’d agree to privatize liquor sales already.
It was the right tool for me. I was a two+ pack/day smoker for 37 years. Tried and failed to quit multiple times over the years. Nothing worked until I switched to e-cigs, stepping down my nicotine dose almost monthly, and six months later I was done. No more cigarettes, no more more vaping, no more nicotine. Now I’ve been nicotine free for almost two years.
heh the vaping industry is on borrowed time anyways because the federal government is pretty much planning the same thing nationally and from what I’m told has all ready started the process already
You’re right, they should start selling groceries. Maybe cars. Wait, I got it! Bob’s Vape Shop and Law Office!
:rolleyes:
Why not groceries, or the same sorts of things that are sold by the people who run convenience stores and sell regular cigarettes? Roll your eyes all you want, but as i said, public policy should not be dictated by this very narrow issue. If taxing e-cigs is the right thing to do, then tax them. If it’s not the right thing to do, then don’t.
U.S. Society just cannot let go and let people enjoy themselves. Regulation and tax and outright criminalization is a disease in this country.
Airman, I totally understand your point.
My wife and I both quit smoking. I was a situational smoker, she was a routine smoker (i.e. I could go days without a cig if it came to that, she would get a little… well, mean… if she could not have a smoke).
Now, she puffs away with her big honking vaping whatsafudge in all these different flavors and that is cool. She quit smoking. Her doctor applauded her. Me, I puff a few times a day on a Blu, especially when drinking or gaming, and I am happy.
I just do not understand the desire of some people to control the lives of others when the behavior of those other people has absolutely zero effect on them.
I expect we will see laws very soon about perfume users and body odor and bad breath and… well you get my point.
Dear God people, we live in a society. That means other people do things you may not like. If it is excessive, let’s talk. But, this has gotten out of hand.
Hey, we hate you and your death sticks in our places. Get out.
…ok
Hey, we still hate you and your death sticks **outside **our places, I might actually have to walk through and smell your smoke (while I am breathing in more pollution from cars and factories than was EVER produced from that .5 seconds i walked through your smoke but that does not matter). Get out of this entire park/area.
…ok
QUIT your smoking anywhere, you heathen, tax you, tax you, tax you. Laws banning you everywhere and shame, shame, shame.
…ok, I am going to vape
ZOMG, stop your vaping you horrible person.
… get bent you freaking fascists.
This from a person who vapes solely at home maybe 3 times a week when I am chugging beers and playing EVE online, but is just sick of people who want to threaten others with MORE laws and regulations and taxes for doing harmless things because they don’t like them.
Then why did you bring up the subject of purported health benefits in the first place?
So (unless words mean only what you want them to mean and no more), you suggested that making the product considerably more expensive was bad from a public health perspective, and I responded that public health is already served by known effective smoking cessation strategies which are not predicated on continuing indefinite nicotine addiction.
A point you continue to ignore.
This is beyond silly.
*Harrisburg, PA (AP)
“Pennsylvania lawmakers today announced plans to roll back a tax increase for e-cigarettes, after finding out that a poster on the Straight Dope said they had helped him quit smoking. “It’s only logical” said state representative Manson Poopnik. “As long as a single person benefited from e-cigarettes, we have no right to tax the bejesus out of them.” The legislature is now considering plans to revoke large sections of Pennsylvania health regulations and the penal code, after learning of individuals who reported benefiting from proscribed practices.”*
The point is not lost on me, and there’s no contradiction here at all.
There ARE, in fact, some health benefits to be gained by vaping in comparison to smoking actual cigarettes. That is, if X people switch from cigarettes to vaping, society sees a net health benefit.
The fact that there may be other strategies that are better than vaping for those who are trying to cease smoking altogether does not mean that vaping provides no net health benefit.
Is that simple enough for you?
You’re a fucking idiot.
My point, quite clearly, was NOT to say that anecdotal evidence should drive public policy. In fact, i was saying quite the opposite.
I said, if you would read the sentence that you quoted again (slowly, and while moving your lips, no doubt), that even if vaping does NOT cause a single person to actually cease smoking altogether, my arguments against this tax would remain exactly the same.
That is, even if you are right, and vaping doesn’t help people quit smoking as well as some other products, this is still a bad tax.
Simple enough for you, numnuts?
Enough with the e-cigs are supposed to help you quit smoking bull shit.
Just like some people still want their soda with out the calories. (Diet soda)
Some folks want their nicotine sans the carcinogens.
I can relate. Apparently, I really like the stuff, especially when I’m thinking real hard, which is my favorite form of exercise. But I am definitely hooked like a motherfuck, so if vaping will make the monkey shut up, well, OK.
Second hand smoke is far from ‘harmless’, as has been shown over and over. Vape fanatics claim that second hand vape is just some water vapor and harmless chemicals, but the only reputable studies show that it’s definitely not entirely safe (though the exact dangers are not known), and the fact that you can smell vape exhaust tells you it’s not entirely ‘clean’. Smokers/vapers who try to pretend that their activity is ‘harmless’ when it definitely harms other people aren’t going to get a lot of sympathy.
Does “net health benefit” apply, even when a substantial number of e-cig users represent new recruits for nicotine addiction?
“There are some data that e-cigarettes are attracting both former smokers and never smokers. In fact, one estimate suggests that nearly one third (32.5%) of current e-cigarette users are never or former smokers. The downstream implications for illness from e-cigarettes are unknown, but because e-cigarettes are nicotine delivery devices, there is some concern over nicotine addiction, particularly among new users.”
E-cig manufacturers are using tactics similar to conventional cigarette makers to recruit the young.
Yammering about “net health benefits” also does not take into account health and economic effects of long-term nicotine addiction and exposure to "vaping’ chemicals among users as a whole. But since it’s evident you are unwilling or intellectually incapable of grasping these points, let’s move on.
Something not mentioned (or certainly, not conceded) in this discussion is the well-known fact that high prices/taxes discourages young people/never smokers from taking up smoking, something the industry knows full well. And it’s highly likely that driving up e-cigarette prices through high taxes will have a similar effect on teenagers who’ve never smoked, but think e-cigs are “cool” and that it’s neat they come in all those different flavors.
“In their current untaxed position, e-cigarettes are a financially attractive alternative to conventional cigarettes. Based on the current evidence about health and the contention by several e-cigarette manufacturers that they not be seen as a smoking cessation treatment, it seems that leaving e-cigarettes in a financially attractive position, particularly for never smokers, is not warranted. Taxation at rates consistent with conventional cigarettes would provide public revenues but would also likely decrease demand among former or never smokers. This would decrease the creation of new nicotine addicts.”
Also, note that while vapids claim that Big Tobacco wants to hurt the e-cig industry by promoting high taxes, Big Tobacco itself benefits by low/absent taxes on e-cigs (for instance, the R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co. says taxes on e-cigs should be much lower than on tobacco).
Depends whether, in the absence of e-cigs, those people would have simply been new recruits for traditional cigarettes. None of your citations make any claim about whether or not this is the case.
I’ve already said, in this thread, that i’m perfectly happy for e-cigs to be treated and regulated in the same way as regular cigarettes. To be honest, if the PA tax brings e-cig taxation in line with regular cigarette taxes, then i don’t have too much trouble with it, especially from a public health perspective. It’s not clear to me what the overall taxation rate is on the two products, from the data available on the recent tax increase.
Seeing that smoking rates have long been on the decline amid abundant evidence of the harms of smoking, it is highly doubtful all or even most of those new users would have jumped on the tobacco bandwagon in the absence of e-cigs (which are heavily promoted as “safe” alternatives to traditional smoking).
There is however evidence that e-cig users who never smoked are disproportionately attracted to the tobacco habit.
“Teenagers who use e-cigarettes are more likely to take up smoking a year later, research suggests.
Never-smokers who tried e-cigarettes were almost three times as likely to smoke cigarettes a year later compared with those who had never had an e-cigarette.”
So now you can argue that those teens were just addictive personalities who would’ve gravitated to smoking anyway. :dubious:
This is very poor logic.
Yes, smoking rates are on the decline, but there are still tens of thousands of people who take up smoking every year, despite the “abundant evidence of the harms of smoking.” According to the CDC, “Each day, more than 3,200 people younger than 18 years of age smoke their first cigarette… Each day, an estimated 2,100 youth and young adults who have been occasional smokers become daily cigarette smokers.”
So it is entirely possible that a lot of those people who take up e-cigs might be people who would otherwise have taken up regular cigarettes.
I’m sure that some of what you say is true; i’m sure that the strange and exotic flavors available to vapers, as well as the fact that it seems cool and new, means that there are people in the United States who would never have smoked regular cigarettes, but who do take up vaping. I’m also not interested in disputing the idea that the people who sell e-cigs intentionally market their products to young people. Asshole tobacco producers have been doing that forever, and i’m not at all surprised that they still do it, especially since the tobacco companies also own much of the vapor industry.
But there still seems to be some disagreement, even among reputable scientists, about the net health impact of e-cigs and vaping.
The nub of the debate is summed up in one of the New York Times headlines among those links: Are e-cigarettes a path to tobacco, or from it? There appears to be no true consensus on this issue among medical and public health professionals, either here or in Europe. I’m not dismissing your argument out of hand; simply noting that your own arguments in this thread are disputed by a number of people with considerable expertise in this area.
Personally, i think vaping is idiotic. It looks stupid (did anyone see the images of that asshole congressman vaping in a hearing or a committee meeting? What a fucking tool), and it certainly isn’t good for you. I would recommend against it, if anyone asked for my opinion. I still don’t believe that a 40% ad valorem tax on these products is a good idea.
On average in the US, 53% of the price of a pack of cigarettes is due to a combination of federal, state, and sometimes local taxes. One of the reasons vaping is so cheap is that it hasn’t had more than sales tax on it in most places, while it’s primary competitor (regular cigarettes) has it’s price roughly doubled by taxes. The people saying that it’s impossible for a business to function under the PA tax are ignoring that the tobacco industry has been raking in cash under a much harsher tax setup.
There are figures demonstrating that even more young people have adopted e-cigs than take up smoking.
“National data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) show that youth use of electronic cigarettes exceeds use of cigarettes for the second year in a row, with 16.0 percent of high schoolers and 5.3 percent of middle schoolers reporting current use in 2015. Since 2011 there has been a tenfold increase in use among high schoolers (the rate was just 1.5 percent in 2011) and a nearly five-fold increase in use among middler schoolers (from 1.1% to 5.3%).”
Meantime, the percentage of young people who smoke has been dropping for years, resulting (as of 2014) in its lowest level in decades. And this trend predates the introduction of e-cigs:
http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0612-yrbs.html
This suggests that e-cig usage, in addition to being a gateway to smoking for some, is a popular alternative path to nicotine use in its own right. So we wind up with a boatload of extra nicotine addicts.
Again, I’m dubious about the ethics of high taxes on e-cigs solely for the benefit of state and federal treasuries (without a substantial percentage going for research into and treatment of diseases and economic/social harms of nicotine addiction). But an argument can be made that by taxing both e-cigs and tobacco out of the range of teens, some of these deleterious effects can be avoided.
A recent study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Cancer Institute and the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network concludes that under most plausible scenarios e-cigarettes and other nicotine vapor products will have an overall positive public health impact. Their most conservative estimate of the net benefit is a 21% decrease in smoking related deaths among a cohort 20 years old and younger.
They took into account the possibility of some people who would never have tried tobacco products using ecigs, and that of ecigs potentially being a gateway to tobacco use for some. They also acknowledge that ecigs may have unknown health consequences that won’t be known until they have been in use for decades. Despite all these possibilities they conclude the benefit outweighs the harm in any plausible scenario they modeled.
Undue regulation could stifle an industry that clearly offers a healthier alternative to tobacco use.
As to the OP though, internet shops already had a price advantage over brick and mortar stores. The benefits of being able to go in, sample products, talk to experts, etc. are certainly valid points but that still didn’t stop websites from scooping up a lot of business before any particular state taxes were imposed.
These products are fairly inexpensive anyway and those who were already willing to pay a premium for the advantages of going into a store will still probably be willing to pay the new tax too, knowing it is the state that’s dicking them over and not the vape shop.
Do batteries from a brick and mortar store last longer than those bought on the web?