• edwardbear@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Vaping has been under attack since day one. If you put the legwork and trace every law made that targets vaping, the “Yay”s voting are all lobbied by… you got it. Big Tobacco Companies. Philip Morris, British American, etc etc.

        I’m all for regulation, but this is made intentional. I won’t be surprised if Big Tobacco are rubbing their greedy little hands that the next wave nicotine hooked people are now their customers.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Once you start seeing the huge financial incentives to keeping people smoking cigarettes specifically, you can’t unsee it. From tobacco companies, sure, but also from state governments. State governments get a large amount of revenue from cigarette smokers. And for many of the more financially mismanaged ones, that revenue pays off debts that would otherwise leave them insolvent.

        Article from 2008. It wasn’t just mortgages that were being “securitized”, Wall Street managed to sell state governments on securitizing their payouts from the tobacco company Master Settlement Agreement. States sold those payments to Wall St for pennies on the dollar to get a quick infusion of cash, and now they owe and they can only keep paying if people keep smoking cigs.

        Article from 2014, when the e-cig boom was starting. you can see how concerning the loss of revenue is.

        So you get an unholy alliance between tobacco companies (who yes, own a lot of vape brands but see higher margins from traditional cigarettes) and state governments. Throw in the stupid parents having a moral panic, and the conclusion is obvious: ban vapes, leave cigarettes.