Apparently, the nicotine business never changes—with smoke
or without. Big Tobacco fought government overseers for decades, but eventually
traditional cigarettes became heavily regulated products. Now the Food and Drug
Administration is working on a package of regulations for e-cigarettes devices,
which vaporize liquid nicotine with heat, rather than burning it via tobacco
leaves. Among other things, the FDA is considering a ban on online sales of
e-cigarettes to cut down on sales to minors, and discussing whether to curtail
advertising. A roster of proposed rules is expected in October.
The regulatory chatter comes as the e-cigarette market is
finally expected to top $1 billion this year. Tobacco giant Altria Group (MO)
is just this month rolling out its e-cigarette, dubbed “MarkTen.” Reynolds
American (RAI) is also rushing to ship its VUSE product. Meanwhile, Lorillard
(LO) booked $57 million in e-cigarette revenue in the first three months of the
year.
Bloomberg Industries estimates that at their current pace,
e-cigarette sales will top that of traditional smokes by 2047. The estimate
comes with a big caveat: the assumption that politicians won’t heap a bunch of
new taxes on e-cigarettes—levies that have served as a sort of emphysema to the
body of the cigarette business.
Currently, e-cigarettes are subject to ordinary sales
taxes—just like, say, pencils. Big Tobacco loves that. Here’s why: In the
average state, 11 percent of cigarettes are smuggled, according to a recent
report by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank.
“Smuggled” in this case has a few meanings. It includes smokes that are
illegally ferried from states and countries with lower taxes, as well as
counterfeit cigarettes.
“Once a tax gets too high, it acts in the same way that
Prohibition did: You get substantial black-market activity,” says Scott
Drenkard, an economist at the Tax Foundation.
Meanwhile, the preponderance of smuggled cigarettes is
alarming and the Mackinac Center says counterfeits—often stuffed full of
sawdust and “human excrement”—are a growing problem.
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