The Enemies of Vaping
Ok, it’s no surprise that vaping has enemies. A lot of them in fact. And I think it’s time to show who they are and perhaps why they hate us. Plus we don’t have a chance of survival if we don’t know who we’re fighting against. Make no mistake, this is a fight, there will be a winner and there will be a loser. I think we need to make sure it’s not us.
Let’s start with the obvious ones.
Big Tobacco
Global tobacco profits for the 6 largest firms are around 35 billion dollars per year. That’s over $1000 per second in profit for these guys. With that kind of money at stake, you can bet they won’t go down without a fight and probably the dirtiest one you can imagine.
Sure, they may have tried to start and/or buy their way into vaping with cigalikes and its closed system, but being a slow moving beast, they can’t adapt that quickly to new technologies. They will NEVER support an open vaping system. E-liquid in bottles, RBA’s, Mods, etc… forget about it. They hate competition and they definitely hate you.
GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer
These three companies control the majority of the NRT’s or nicotine replacement therapies.
Glaxo and J&J control Nicorette and Pfizer controls Chantix. Whether these work for quitting is up for debate, but one thing is for sure, they don’t want you vaping. They have multi-billion dollar products to protect. As sales of these products start to fall, they will join the fight against us, and it looks like it’s already happening.
Local and State Governments
You can pretty much read about a new ban every day in all sorts of cities and states across America. You can’t vape in public, you can’t vape inside, you can’t even vape inside some vape shops. Local and state governments have a TON to lose from vaping. And a lot of it is money.
State and local tax revenues from cigarettes has topped 17 billion dollars per year. There is no way to replace that tax with e-cigarettes since the only thing taxable is the nicotine, for now at least.
Another issue that will be the center of attention at some point in the near future are state tobacco bonds. Basically states won huge settlements from big tobacco and receive money each year based on the amount of cigarettes sold in each state. So, states issued bonds to take huge lump sums up front. But as sales of cigarettes go down, payments from big tobacco go down and these state governments aren’t able to pay back the bond holders. So the bonds go into default and guess what they’ll blame, vaping.
States across the country will try to make up for it by taxing the hell out of vaping in any way they can. These tobacco bonds are going to be a huge problem and we should really be prepared before this happens.
Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Paypal (US)
Maybe not a direct enemy, but definitely not a friend, nor even an acquaintance for that matter. They don’t want to know you and they don’t want you using their platforms for anything remotely vaping.
It’s their platform and they can do with it what they want and apparently the risk is too high. When buying or selling vape gear, don’t use these places, you risk losing your hard earned money.
A women on Etsy selling painted glass tanks for vaping just recently had her store removed and potentially any money sitting in her Etsy account as well.
Hosted shopping cart solutions like Shopify, Bigcommerce, 3dcart, etc…
For all you sellers out there, I would be worried about these guys. They, like Amazon, Ebay, and Etsy, own and control their respective platforms. You are just leasing it from them.
All it takes is one single change of their TOS and you can say good night to your online store.
They already don’t allow you to use their point of sale systems nor their payment processors, you need a third party for that.
Here are a few more against vaping:
World Health Organization — http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/26/who-anti-vaping-report/
Democrats — http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/14/1275718/-Democrats-Stop-the-war-on-vaping
Jay Rockefeller — http://www.creators.com/opinion/jacob-sullum/jay-rockefellers-vaping-vapors-a-senate-hearing-highlights-irrational-hostility-toward-e-cigarettes.html
Brennen is the founder of onVaping.
