By Nansen Malin / For The Herald
Following some late-night legislative maneuvering, our elected officials in Olympia appear poised to usher into law a new, hefty tax of 95 percent on nicotine pouches that have recently become all the rage.
As a mom of an adult son who uses those nicotine pouches, I certainly share concerns about excessive consumption of them; the same as I share concerns about our kids, whether they’re 16 or 60, eating entire boxes of chocolate chip cookies in a single, 15-minute setting, ingesting too much caffeine, or spending too much time playing brain dead video games. If I’m being honest, I would like my son to cut back his use.
And yet, I am also grateful he is only using nicotine pouches, and not smoking a pack a day of cigarettes, which would almost certainly lead to him developing lung cancer, COPD, emphysema, asthma, or some other severely debilitating or even fatal condition. I don’t want him — or anyone else’s kids, underage or fully grown — being pushed towards that deadly habit.
The sad reality is that this 95 percent tax could easily do exactly that.
According to New York University Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences Dr. Ray Niaura, “Taxing reduced risk tobacco products, such as nicotine pouches and vapes, at high levels will discourage their use, but will also drive people back to smoking cheaper cigarettes. This will maintain smoking’s deadly toll on Americans’ health and lives.”
Niaura adds that “A more sensible and desirable approach would be to tax reduced risk products in proportion to the harm caused by cigarettes — lower risk, lower taxes — while keeping cigarette taxes high. As a consequence, smokers will be encouraged to switch to safer, lower risk products, quit smoking, and end up costing taxpayers less in health care costs.”
Niaura is not the only scientist who worries about policy targeting products like nicotine pouches pushing people, including kids, to smoke conventional, combustible, deadly cigarettes. Scientists from Yale, George Washington University, and the University of Missouri have found that policies hammering vapor products pushed youth and teens to cigarettes. While legislators were right to reject a vapor and nicotine pouch flavoring ban for exactly this reason, taxing these products heavily will have the same ill effects.
All this when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, under President Biden, determined that “due to substantially lower amounts of harmful constituents than cigarettes and most smokeless tobacco products, such as moist snuff and snus,” a slew of nicotine pouches “pose lower risk of cancer and other serious health conditions” than cigarettes, snuff and snus.
All this when, in the United Kingdom, for years now, the health service has actually recommended vapor products to smokers as a safer alternative.
There is precious little time between now and the end of the legislative session.
If legislators do not manage to back out this hefty tax increase, or even better, apply a lower tax rate to less harmful products and a higher one to the literal cancer sticks, the governor should exercise his option to veto.
To the extent leaders in Olympia are concerned about raising revenue to fill our state’s budget hole and combating the use of harmful products by kids, they could look instead to steep fines levied on those who sell products to underage users, or who help kids procure them. That is a real disincentive to kids using products that are not appropriate for them, and one that we all know works— with zero public health downside.
Nansen Malin is a Washington state mother, businesswoman, salmon advocate and political activist.
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