As I mentioned back in June, the European Commission has been hatching a plan to introduce EU-wide taxes on e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches. Consumers have got wind of this and replied in large numbers to a consultation that the Commission was obliged to hold. As one might expect, the response was overwhelmingly negative.
The “public health” NGOs are hopping mad about the public getting involved in a public consultation and have hit back via one of their favourite mouthpieces, Politico. Noting that there were 18,480 responses and that this is “nine times the average for EU consultations”, Politico chose to use the following headline for its story:
EU tobacco tax hike plan swamped with pro-industry feedback
The hoary old fallacy that market transactions solely benefit the seller and not the buyer is alive and well. Excise taxes are paid by the consumer, not the industry, and users of nicotine pouches have an obvious incentive to oppose dramatic price increases. A tax hike plan being “swamped by pro-consumer feedback” wouldn’t sound as scary, but it would be a more accurate way of describing what happened.
It would be nice to think that the tobacco, vape and pouch industries put up the bat signal to let their customers know what was about to hit them if they didn’t mobilise. That is what socially responsible businesses should be doing in a democracy. I didn’t see any evidence of it myself and it doesn’t look like the NGOs did either, otherwise they wouldn’t have to resort to ludicrous inferences like this…
Thousands of the posts use terms created only by the sector. For example, more than 6,000 mentioned “harm reduction” to describe products such as e-cigarettes — an industry narrative to describe these products compared with conventional cigarettes.
“Harm reduction” is a well established term in public health. It goes back decades. Harm reduction seeks to avoid making the perfect an enemy of the good. If people are going to use nicotine, that is up to them, but they should be encouraged to use nicotine in its safest form. The idea that the very concept of harm reduction was “created” by an industry to suit its own “narrative” is a pernicious lie, albeit one that is being increasingly used by agents of the nanny state. The World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, created more than twenty years ago, explicitly defines tobacco control as “a range of supply, demand and harm reduction strategies that aim to improve the health of a population by eliminating or reducing their consumption of tobacco products and exposure to tobacco smoke”.
Speaking of the WHO:
And more than 8,000 raised concerns about illicit tobacco trade — an argument often raised by industry in response to higher taxes, but which has been debunked by the World Health Organization.
Alas, Politico gives no details about where and when the WHO “debunked” something that experience tells us is true. Has anyone told Australia that higher taxes do not fuel the illicit trade?
Piling one absurd assertion on top of another, Politico claims that:
The WHO, meanwhile, has said illicit trade in tobacco can be addressed even with higher taxes.
I can’t even begin to imagine the mechanism by which this could work, nor how anyone could say it with a straight face. Ninety per cent of “public health” these days is just people saying obvious nonsense with unflappable confidence and hoping nobody calls them out.
Health groups are struggling to have their voices heard over the stampede of responses supporting industry. Just fewer than 90 health nongovernmental organizations responded, accounting for 0.5 percent of all responses, Impact Unfiltered found.
Perhaps these groups should have e-mailed their millions of supporters and asked them to respond to the public consultation. Except they don’t have millions of supporters, do they? They barely have any. While the vape industry has millions of satisfied customers who vote with their wallets every day, few people are weird enough to expend their time and money lobbying for a clampdown on the freedom of others. That job is left to a handful of professional puritans funded by elites. Impact Unfiltered — the source for Politico’s story — is one of these, funded by two foundations and with only team members listed on its website. One of them is a fellow at the gloriously titled School for Moral Ambition and works for one of Mike Bloomberg’s many front groups, Vital Strategies. What are these organisations? Who do they represent? Can organisations that want to deter smokers from using safer nicotine products even be called “health groups”?
So long as it’s a battle between a few corporations and a few NGOs, the NGOs can be confident of victory. But in a fair fight involving the general public, the coercive paternalists are greatly outnumbered. That is why they do everything to sideline the public and keep the debate, such as it is, within the corridors of power.
It says a lot about “public health” that the voice of the public is not welcome
But every now and again the game is made fair. Consumers rally from their slumber and EU institutions, who are ostensibly obsessed with engaging with “citizens” and “stakeholders”, get a taste of the will of the people. When that happens, all the NGOs can do is rubbish the game. Impact Unfiltered talk about “massive consultation spam”. The executive director of Action on Smoking and Health (USA) predictably complains about “an organized industry playbook”. “This isn’t democratic input,” he says, “it’s manufactured opposition.” Not a shred of evidence is provided for any of these claims. If you claim to be acting in the name of “public health”, you can say what you want and no one — let alone the NGO’s poodles at Politico — is going to ask you to back it up.
It says a lot about the EU’s democratic deficit that 18,480 responses to a consultation from a population of 450 million is considered to be a large number, let alone a suspiciously large number. And it says a lot about “public health” that the voice of the public is not welcome.
