THE PRICE OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING
Many non-smokers in the last few years have sneered openly at the smoker’s plight. This self-righteous brigade of nannies have ensured tobacco prices are raised year on year and this in turn saw the explosion in black market tobacco.
Excluding smokers from the pubs and bars on the shaky pretext of saving the lives of barmen has seen a pub a day close in Ireland with the resultant redundancy of a lot of healthy barmen. This absence of pubs, particularly in rural areas, has had the knock effect of changing the social lives of whole areas and led in turn to a dramatic increase in home drinking and loneliness.
There has been many suggestions from elsewhere in the world that the Pharmaceutical Industry was behind all of it. The theory goes that they invested millions into the development of alternative nicotine delivery systems such as gums and patches and sold these through the traditional chemist’s shops. Despite heavy advertising though, the take-up was pathetic. Smokers bought cigarettes because that is what they wanted with their own money. Big Pharma was left with a dilemma. Do we take a bit hit and drop these products or do something to force smokers to buy them. So the greasing of palms in both politics and medicine begat an anti-smoking movement lavishly funded to agitate for laws to make smoking difficult and unattractive.
And it was all going to plan as well until something unforetold happened. A little Chinaman tinkered around in his garage trying to make something look, taste and operate like a cigarette but without the unwanted dangers of real burning tobacco. The electronic cigarette was born. By the time it came here, our Government had tobacco products completely overtaxed and we had the most expensive cigarettes in the EU. Still the pharmaceutical nicotine stuff wasn’t selling despite the endless doctor’s referrals in that direction. When tax revenue from tobacco fell due to smokers switching to the black market, the answer was always to put up the tax further.
Then in a quite natural organic way, smokers began to drift towards experimenting with the new-fangled e-cig. It began slowly but then quickly gathered pace. As this was going on the Government had just hidden tobacco from view in the shops and was working on a law to insist the boxes containing it must become ugly and grotesque. Guys like me continued to smoke but whenever I went out, I used the e-cig. In public, the Government put on a united anti-tobacco face but in private, they were concerned at the falling revenue from legal tobacco sales. It was a nice little annual earner yielding one-and-a-half billion a year to them but this had begun to edge down.
Speaking on behalf of the Government though, Public Health and the charities assured the public that this loss of tobacco tax to the State was a very good thing. People were living longer into old age and the two parties saying all of this were still raking in the Pharma and grant monies to carry on their crusade. The six-figure salaries were not in doubt for them. But the big cloud on the horizon was the collapsing health service. Old people are always getting sick and the more of them there are, the worse it is for the HSE, despite their protestations.The hospitals call these old non-smokers bed-blockers.
The other big cloud for the Pharmaceutical Industry, Public Health and the charities were those damned e-cigs. Unable to find a problem with these things they adopted instead a tactic of hinting darkly at the possible dangers of their long term use. It was a fabricated rumour without substance of course. What was really driving them crazy though was the sheer numbers of people who were quitting smoking and turning voluntarily to the humble e-cigarette instead of buying the expensive, useless Pharma products. The whole point of the anti-smoking scam from day one was to re-direct the smoker’s buying power, of two billion euros a year, away from the Tobacco Companies and over to the Pharmaceutical Industry. That was to be the big pay-off.
But that, “nicotine war,” discovered how effective the third entrant to it could be. You see, the Tobacco Companies thought they could depend on addiction to guarantee sales while the Pharmaceutical Industry used the blunt instrument of paid for laws to command the smoker to comply. The e-cig allowed the smoker free will and choice, thus its popularity.
Fast forward to today and the Tobacco Companies are embracing the e-cig and even coming up with safer tobacco products themselves while still offering the traditional smoke. The Pharmaceutical Industry is fuming at Government and its other partners as more and more smokers try an e-cig for themselves or still buy black market cigarettes. But the big losers are the Revenue Commissioners. The annual take for tobacco in 2016 was down to around one-point-one billion, (a drop of €400M in one year), and they are forecasting a further fall this year. With a doctor in charge of the country facing his first budget next month, any fall in revenue from the usual places is worrying. But there’s a problem for Taoiseach Leo. A further increase in tobacco prices will bring the yield from tobacco products further down rather than up, as the Revenue Commissioners have repeatedly warned.
While e-cigs are subject to VAT like everything else, they are still a cheaper alternative when it comes to satisfying your desire for nicotine and you can vape in all the better pubs too. But the big win for the Government, if they haven’t been hypocritical all along about their concern for smoker’s health, is that finally smokers are switching to something 99% safer, their e-cigs.
So I was shocked to read in The Sun that officials in the Department of Finance are advising Paschal Donohoe that, “One way to raise money would be to extend the tax on tobacco to e-cigarettes. The briefing doc points out that smoking is in decline and so tax income is expected to fall.” But this war on tobacco was never about revenue, we were told. It was always solely a health issue to protect up all from the dangers of smoke, firsthand and second. Are they now proposing to stop us quitting smoking or heavily penalize us for trying?
New taxes could be slapped on e-cigarettes, gambling and the VAT rate for tourism in next Budget
Let me explain the money angle here. In Ireland, a packet of twenty cigarettes pre-tax would cost you €2.38 but then €8.62 is added in combined taxation.The equivalent of twenty cigarettes in e-cig form is a €2.00 cartridge. If they tax this as a tobacco product, an e-cig cartridge will shoot up to €10.70!!! Twenty cigarettes on the ever available black market is about €4.00 so this new proposal is a huge tax on opting to be healthy and a strong incentive to get back to smoking the real thing.
If this is the course Doctor Varakar gives his blessing to in next month’s budget then you’ll know once and for all that their priority is money and not health. You will know for sure that this whole anti-tobacco crusade from the smoking ban to plain packs was, and still is about money and nothing else.
Oh! And the price of social engineering to date has been five hundred million euros and rising…………
A good summation of the situation, John. One could add that further to the pharmaceutical companies controlling a multi-billion global NRT market on the back of the bans they financed, there is also a huge payoff from all the complaints that follow on from giving up smoking, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and depression. The medications prescribed for those alone is worth billions, too. All in all, persecution of smokers is a massive earner for Big P.
I remain sceptical of the claims that e-cigs are ‘99% safer’, and the ‘billion lives’ meme. These are figures plucked out of thin air, and are meaningless. I think vaping probably is less harmful than smoking, but to what degree is really anyone’s guess.
Carl Phillips, who is probably the cleverest and most honest THR advocate around, dismisses the ‘95% safer’ claim out of hand, pointing out that there is actually no evidence at all to back that claim up, although he still advocates for e-cigs over tobacco as a less harmful alternative.
It will, as you say, be very interesting to see how the various governments deal with falling revenues from tobacco. And how they deal with the claims of the anti-smokers that giving up smoking prolongs life, with all that extended life’s attendant extra expenses to the government in health care and pensions. As you point out, they have passed the peak of the Laffer Curve as far as increasing tobacco taxes is concerned, so hefty increases in tax won’t bring any more into the treasury. I can see them all arriving at a ‘Fuck me, we royally screwed up by forcing smokers to quit’ moment, and deciding to do a rapid U-turn on smoking laws, Public Health whiners notwithstanding. It’s either that, or increase the base rate of tax by a few percentage points, which they know is a vote loser.
I agree with your points on Big P. As regards safer e-cigs, all of the accusations on the dangers of smoking point to the smoke from burning tobacco. Neither the cigarette, the tobacco in it or the resultant nicotine present any dangers. But when anything is set alight, its properties change fundamentally. So when you have a product that is not lit, does not contain tobacco and is therefore incapable of emitting smoke of any kind, in theory all of the danger is gone, hence the 95% safer claims. In the past I have read detailed studies on smoke from barbecues, coal fires, burning woods and even candles and it seems many of the claims made against tobacco apply here as well. But then, the very air we breathe is polluted with many kinds of carcinogens for a variety of reasons. No Government anywhere guarantees to provide its citizens with fresh air which makes the smoking ban a bit of a farce to my mind. In Ireland if you fear the air in your district has been poisoned for any reason, the onus on you is to prove it. Even if you could, and that’s highly unlikely given the ringer you would be put through, you would then have to prove that it wasn’t always polluted before you noticed it and that can’t be done. After mortgaging your home to pay for your case, it would inevitably be thrown out.
A wise old man who is also my local publican and brewer told me once that the only way he could see the ban being dropped, (something he would welcome as a non-smoker), was if war broke out. Humourously for a man not renowned for being so, he painted a picture of even the most extreme anti-smokers packing is pub as they smoked and drank to forget the danger we were all in. Mind you I’m going to pray for war but maybe in our modern world I won’t have to.
According to a couple of French(?) researchers, standing next to a BBQ for half an hour delivers the equivalent in carcinogens of the SHS from 200,000 cigarettes.
Yeah! I remember reading something like that and in the case of home fires, a whole host of things that burn also emit noxious substances including many cancer causing agents in the smoke. The issue, as always, is the dose a person is exposed to. A room full of tobacco smoke is less dangerous than many common household items when ignited and the volumes of smoke produced by a house fire is far more. The question is the amount inhaled.
When banning smoking I remember them saying that even one cigarette is dangerous. Fea-rmongering has to be kept simple for the masses to comprehend so exaggerating, telling lies or being completely inaccurate is fine if it misleads the public to support the lie.