I now know why they want to ban e-cigs...

[D103]

I would not be so quick to let Big tobacco 'off the hook' and assume they are just 'laying in the grass somewhere'. I would be very interested to know why so many other countries have chosen to ban e-cigarettes, especially given the complete lack of any documented cases of actual harm - this after seven years of use on the world market. You can bet that those decisions were made with money, not Public Health, in mind and one industry in a position to offer very lucrative incentives would be BT. There have been many articles written on how Big tobacco has aggressively targeted other countries in an effort to make up for 'falling profits' in the United States and the threat of e-cigarettes cutting into those profits is very real. It makes sense from a sheer business standpoint to protect those profits in whatever way possible and with quite possibly less risk of public exposure in terms of "deals made." This is just my opinion but I find it very odd that so many countries have gone straight to an outright ban, given the lack of demonstrated harm.

 

[daisyd]

It wasn't going on long before Obama, in fact Bush vetoed the same SCHIP bill that Obama signed that raised the tax on SYO tobacco from $1.00 a pound to over $24.00 a pound. The sad part is that either the tobacco manufacturers or the retailers started selling pipe tobacco as SYO tobacco that was taxed at less than $3.00 but charged the $24.00 a pound tax for it.

That is because they all had to pay the extra tax on what they had on the shelf already. They had to come up with the taxes for what they had on the shelf at the end of April to be paid by the end of August. It was a pretty low blow for the small business guys.

I'm sorry, I thought you were saying they raised the tax on the regular RYO. Raising the tax on the pipe tobacco would just be a quick way to make a buck. That said, they may have needed to do that in order to pay the above mentioned extra taxes.