For decades, the government has played a game with smokers: Urged them to quit since their smoking-related diseases are a burden on the government subsidized health care system, but kept cigarettes around and extremely taxed in order to obtain revenues from them. Smokers are indeed a dying race, but they remain resilient although most of their civil freedoms disappear as soon as they light the cigarette.
It is a difficult task to estimate how much money has been spent on getting smokers to quit their addictive habit. Most of the methods used are completely decoupled from reality. Smokers should quit because they die too young – so what? Aren't the nearly-bankrupt pension systems in most countries in a dying need to get rid of some of our elders? Smokers should quit because they carry around toxic chemical that kill asthma-patients and children. Well, so do cars, many toys, the windmill-factories, the paint used to make protester-signs for Greenpeace-rallies, and so on. Smokers should quit because they are wasting their money. So is the taxpayer. Should he quit paying taxes?
Smokers remain resilient and for good reasons. First of all, nicotine is hard to kick. Second of all, smokers usually have a lot of little daily routines built around the cigarette: The first coffee cup in the morning, the break at work, the getaway from a hectic household, the relaxing effect when watching television, the holding of something in ones restless fingers, etc. The government has not seen this, but the free market did. Hence the invention of the electronic cigarette, or the e-cigarette.
The e-cigarette is usually a two-part device: A battery and a container for a liquid. The container stores the liquid and a small burner inside it heats it up so that a damp is created, and this can be inhaled. The liquid can be mixed with nicotine. The smoker can then get his “fix”. The damp contains traces of different chemicals, but in such small concentrations that the man standing next to the smoker can usually not smell anything. Compared to the cigarette, the e-cigarette is next to harmless for the user. Compared to car exhaustion, it’s probably completely harmless.
The free market invented the e-cigarette and its popularity is on the rise. Smokers find a lot of the benefits of the cigarette in the e-cigarette (e.g. something to hold in the hand, the feeling of smoke/damp coming out of the mouth, and the nicotine of course). If a smoker wants to kick his habit, he can do so by gradually decreasing the nicotine concentration in his liquid. Thus, the e-cigarette cab assist smokers to quit, although others just want to go on smoking, but without the health risks of the burnt and tar-polluted tobacco leaf and cigarette paper.
Non-smokers feel nothing. They see damp and can perhaps catch some traces of the aromas in their nostrils, but only if they stand close to the smoker and smell on purpose. Do we again have a harmony between the smokers and non-smokers?
The governments of the world have for most part not gotten around to legislate against the e-cigarette. This means that the insanely high tobacco taxes have not reached the e-cigarette yet. Smokers can thus save a lot of money. But whatever isn't legal is often
de facto illegal. The black or gray market bridges the gap in many countries. In Denmark, for example, the nicotine-blended juice is not exactly legal, but widely sold, especially on the internet, and the police seem to do little about it. In Holland, everything is available in the nearest tobacco store.
But where there is harmony and peace there is also a potential for politicians to disrupt everything and make their mark. In many countries, politicians are preparing to step in. They can’t sanction anything which resembles smoke, and see all the tax money from cigarette sales potentially evaporate (forcing them to consider such taxes and a sugar-tax and fat-tax instead to make up for the lost revenue of smoking). In their crusade they can rely on such organizations as The American Heart Association to provide a “scientific” basis for a bigger government with more rules and regulations.
The epoch of the e-cigarette will likely be short-lived. In the meanwhile, I intend to smoke with such a device. If the legislation steps in, restricts access, imposes high taxes and bans some of the nicer variants of the technology, I’ll at least have had a short period of improved health and personal finance. Time will tell what I’ll do after that.
