BRUSSELS — Has Europe reached peak vape? Yes — if the European Commission gets its way.
When EU Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi announced he would hike the tax on e-cigarettes to match tobacco at a conference in Austria last week, his tax commissioner colleague Wopke Hoekstra was telling POLITICO back in Brussels that the industry is “manipulating” children into addiction by getting them hooked on vapes.
“I call this the revenge of the tobacco industry,” he said in an interview at his office in Brussels. “Having this deliberate strategy towards kids, sometimes 11, 12, 13 years old, with fancy flavors that they confuse for candy.”
“I’ve seen that at my own kitchen table,” he said, adding that his children have asked if vapes are so bad since they “taste like strawberries.”
“No, actually, it’s a killer,” he said.
The vaping industry has denied this claim, saying no deaths have been directly caused by legal products.
In July, Hoekstra unveiled his plan to raise the excise duty by 139 percent on cigarettes and by 258 percent on rolling tobacco — and to include new products like vapes.
The plan unleashed a furious response from the tobacco industry, which stepped up its lobbying; in September, Philip Morris International presented a report in a press conference at Brussels’ Autoworld Museum, warning that raising the tax would threaten the thousands of jobs that the industry creates in Europe.
But Hoekstra called that a “bogus” argument.
“It’s not as though those jobs would disappear,” he said. “Let’s do the math on the economics. We’re talking about a health cost that is in the billions of euros.”
Nevertheless, not everyone takes such a hard line on vapes.
Some governments believe they’re a legitimate way to get smokers off more harmful cigarettes. The World Health Organization’s position is that countries should ensure “strong regulations” to reduce their appeal through flavor bans, limits on the concentration and quality of nicotine, and taxes.
The “harm reduction” lobby nevertheless has strong supporters in Brussels. Last year, the European Parliament rejected the Commission’s recommendation to impose stricter rules on where people can vape, with many lawmakers from the center-right and right-wing groups backing them as alternatives to smoking.
“A heavy smoker who switches from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes is doing something good for their health,” Peter Liese, a German doctor and MEP from the European People’s Party, said at the time.
Uphill battle
Securing agreement on the excise plan will be an even tougher ask, given that tax rules require the support of every single EU country to enter into force.
Earlier this year, a group of 15 EU finance ministers pushed for the Commission to move ahead with the revision, calling on the EU executive to extend its scope to vapes.
But since its release, some governments — including Portugal and Sweden — have already spoken out against the idea, with some particularly unhappy about the fact that money raised from the tax will go into European, rather than national, coffers.
Hoekstra still maintains it will be possible to get the plan over the line.
“Even those who might be more hesitant fully acknowledge that vaping kills and vaping kills our kids in particular, and that this is such a completely outrageous strategy by the tobacco lobby that we do have to stop it,” he said, pointing to U.S. research on vaping-related pulmonary disease and deaths.
“The fact is that the younger you start, the more likely you’re going to be to be addicted. And addicted sounds like an innocent word. Well, actually, it’s a disease and a disease that eventually will kill you,” he added.
The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has also warned that kids are being “recruited and trapped at an early age to use e-cigarettes and may get hooked to nicotine.”
POLITICO reached out to the industry lobby, the World Vapers’ Alliance, to respond to Hoekstra’s comments. Its director, Michael Landl, said: “Generally, vaping does not kill. There has not been a single confirmed death attributed to legally regulated vaping products in Europe. Vapes are vastly less harmful than smoking because they avoid the dangerous combustion chemicals found in cigarettes. However, like any nicotine product, they are not completely risk-free. That is why children and non-smokers should not vape.”
Hoekstra’s intervention has won the backing of four health NGOs — the Association of European Cancer Leagues, the European Cancer Organisation, the SmokeFree Partnership and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) — that he met this week alongside Health Commissioner Várhelyi.
“The evidence on the danger of nicotine products, including vaping, is unambiguous: No product that contains nicotine is safe for the cardiovascular system,” said Thomas Lüscher, president of the ESC.
With rising vapes use among children, many of whom will go on to smoke cigarettes, “we are facing a looming cardiovascular health crisis unless strong regulations are enacted,” added cardiologist Thomas Münzel, ESC chair.
Lüscher is also pushing to see the Commission come forward with its proposal for the Tobacco Products Directive, which falls under the health commissioner’s remit and which would also likely see tougher rules imposed across the bloc on vapes.
Hoekstra declined to say when Várhelyi would come out with the proposal, but said his Hungarian colleague was taking a “holistic” approach to the issue.
In Austria last week, Várhelyi told the Gastein health forum that the evaluation of the Tobacco Products Directive and the Tobacco Advertising Directives are “being concluded.”
Cash for health
The extra cash that the move should bring — the Commission estimates some €11.2 billion annually — could see renewed calls from health groups to use the cash to fund health-related programs.
Earlier this week, NGOs called for the EU to make healthier food more affordable through health taxes as part of the EU’s upcoming cardiovascular plan, but Hoekstra stopped short of promising to tie any revenue earned for the EU from cigarettes and vapes to health outcomes.
“I’m sympathetic to the idea, but it is truly the domain of a colleague,” said the former Dutch finance minister, adding that building budgets that tie the collection side to the distribution side is “usually complex.”
He also said looking into junk food and alcohol taxation — on which some countries have called for more EU action — would be “wading into the health domain,” and would be a question for the health commissioner and EU capitals.
Nevertheless, Hoekstra said there was a strong financial incentive to hike up the tobacco and vape taxes, saying: “The bar that we have set in the past, and which we have not indexed, is by now so low that in the vast majority of member states it became completely meaningless.”
This story has been updated with Thomas Münzel’s comment.