July 24, 2024 4:00pm by David Farrar

Heated tobacco products

Associate Health Minister Casey Costello has cut the excise tax on Heated Tobacco Products (HTPs), as she aims to make them more attractive as an alternative to smoking.

Costello, who is also Customs Minister, has cut the excise rate on HTPs by 50% effective from 1 July – a move silently dropped on the Customs website.

Costello refused to be interviewed by RNZ but a spokesman said she had made the move to reduce the cost of the products to encourage smokers to switch to safer alternatives.

But Janet Hoek, a Professor of Public Health at the University of Otago, told RNZ that the move seemed weighted in favour of the tobacco industry.

This is just common sense – you tax less harmful products less than more harmful ones to encourage substitution. This is why vaping is not taxed at the rate of tobacco – because vaping has led to a huge decrease in the smoking rate.

You need to recall there are two type of public health activists – those who will follow the science to reduce harm (ASH) and those who judge policies purely on whether or not they are good or bad for the industry they despise.

The CDC states:

The emissions created from heated tobacco products generally contain lower levels of harmful ingredients than the smoke from regular cigarettes. However, that does not mean heated tobacco products are safe.

Also a good article at The Conservation.

So you should not take up heated tobacco products if you do not smoke or only vape. But if you smoke then heated tobacco seems less harmful than burnt tobacco. There is less evidence on their level of harm than vaping, but the harm hierarchy broadly appears to be:

Smoking > Heated tobacco > Vaping > No nicotine products at all

And so what the Government is doing with tax is:

$1773/kg > $887/kg > no tax = no tax

So they are not signalling HTPs are less harmful than vaping, just less harmful than smoking.