If vaping is banned, millions of Americans will needlessly die

Vaping, we are told, is not an overall benefit to public health because it draws its customers from non-smokers. This is a lie. The real outcry is a result of the fact that vaping poses an existential threat to the tobacco industry’s business model. Sales of cigarettes declined 11.2 percent in May 2019. This follows 18 consecutive months of decline in tobacco sales.

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In the future, these declines in cigarette purchases will translate directly to a decline in deaths. An 11.2 percent decline in smoking sales means that nearly 500,000 deaths-per-year figure could, in the years to come, also decline as fewer smokers introduce tobacco into their lungs. That’s a possible 56,000 lives saved from the ravages of smoking-related illnesses. Again, those are lives potentially saved by vaping in just May 2019. When we consider the total decline in smoking as a result of vaping, we’re looking at saving millions of lives over the long term.

On average, local governments collect $1.73 per pack of cigarettes on top of the approximately $1.00 per pack the federal government collects. This translates to billions of dollars in tax revenue that federal, state, and local governments have come to depend upon. In theory, taxes accomplish the public good of discouraging people from smoking. But in practice, the hysteria over vaping shows our leaders care more about collecting taxes than they do about the health and well-being of their fellow Americans laboring under the self-destructive addiction of cigarettes.

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