Rattled!

The EU’s plan to force member states to levy punitive taxes on e-cigarette fluid and nicotine pouches has not gone down well with the public. A consultation launched last year received 18,480 responses. The vast majority were opposed to the proposal.

This led to a frenzy of activity from a network of NGOs linked to Michael Bloomberg who spat their dummies out and called on the European Commission to disregard to the consultation. Aided and abetted by the useful idiots at Politico, they complained that it had been “swamped with pro-industry feedback”. The executive director of Action on Smoking and Health (USA) claimed that: “This isn’t democratic input,” he says, “it’s manufactured opposition.”

Their evidence for this was that a third of responses had used the phrase “harm reduction” and half of them had “raised concerns about illicit tobacco trade”. This is suspicious, apparently, because the phrase “harm reduction” was invented by the tobacco industry and linking excessive taxation to black market activity is “an argument often raised by industry”.

This is risible. Harm reduction is a concept developed in public health decades ago, long before e-cigarettes and pouches existed, and it is patently obvious that price differentials are a key driver of the shadow economy.

They had another go at it in January when the unpleasant leftwing polemicist Rutger Bregman - who, ironically, has made a career out of attacking billionaires - went on a rant on LinkedIn, alleging that “tobacco interests tried to distort the democratic process with completely fake ‘citizen’ input”.

“This is what democratic hijacking looks like. Big Tobacco lobbyists cite these ‘consultation results’ to European politicians as proof that EU citizens oppose tobacco taxes — even though those ‘citizens’ are corporate sock puppets.”

Bregman said that his School for Moral Ambition had “incubated” Impact Unfiltered. As I reported at the time, Impact Unfiltered only had two employees (it now has three) and they are both graduates of the School for Moral Ambition’s “Tobacco Free Future” internship courtesy of money from Michael Bloomberg via two of his many front groups. Eline Goethals from the School of Moral Ambition has since written a report calling for the total prohibition of all nicotine products. She is currently at the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which, as the name suggests, is primarily funded by the billionaire prohibitionist Mike Bloomberg.

Bregman’s claims were scurillous nonsense but Politico gave Impact Unfiltered another bite of the cherry with a story headlined ‘EU Commission suspects “coordinated” interference in tobacco tax feedback’ which implied that many of the responses were from bots. Within hours of the Politico newsletter going out, this had been debunked by Clearing The Air who put some research using large language models online which found no sign of bots being used. There was very little of the text repetition that you would expect from bots, nor were there suspicious deluges of submissions at certain times. The supposedly fishy terms “harm reduction” and “illicit trade” were each used in fewer than 1,500 submissions, not in more than 6,000, as Impact Unfiltered claimed. Those who responded were more likely to use the colloquial terms “less harmful” and “black market”.

Unfazed, the nicotine prohibitionists were back yet again this week. An article e-mailed out to Politico subscribers claimed:

A quarter of public responses to the EU tobacco tax looked nearly identical, analysis shows

More than a quarter of public feedback responses to higher EU tobacco and nicotine taxes were linked to organized lobbying, according to a European Commission analysis obtained by POLITICO via a transparency disclosure.

The consultation saw thousands of highly similar submissions land within a few hours close to the October 2025 deadline, raising fears of orchestrated tobacco industry interference designed to look like a grassroots-led pushback against higher taxes.

This time the allegation isn’t that the consultation responses were “fake” or “bots” or “corporate sockpuppets” but that some of them came from people who had heard about the EU’s proposals because of campaigns against them. Isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work? There was nothing stopping the anti-nicotine NGOs from running campaigns in favour of vape taxes. Some of them did. It’s just that they don’t have any grassroots support so they were greatly outnumbered by users of low-risk nicotine products who have had enough of being bullied by professional puritans.

According to Politico…

The Commission analysis, obtained through a freedom-of-information request, found that 5,001 submissions, or more than 27 percent of all responses, were linked to “identifiable campaign patterns,” meaning “very similar or closely clustered submissions.”

Although I wouldn’t trust anything Politico says about this without seeing evidence, I would be wholly unsurprised if it were true. Consumers should be made aware of what politicians are planning to do to them and they should be encouraged to respond to public consultations. They are the public, after all. I would expect a flurry of responses in the hours running up to a consultation ending as each side tries to rally its supporters for one last push. I would also expect to see the same arguments being made in most of the responses. There are only so many arguments to make and most of them are fairly obvious.

Incidentally, notice the difference between the Politico headline (“a quarter of public responses to the EU tobacco tax looked nearly identical”) and what is actually being reported (a quarter of responses were linked to “identifiable campaign patterns”).

The biggest cluster of similar responses, made up of 1,918 submissions, was identified in Sweden, a country with a vocal nicotine pouch lobby.

And they should make their voice heard. I’m glad a few of them made the effort. I’m only disappointed there weren’t more.

And then comes the kicker that makes all this mud-slinging irrelevant….

In the tax consultation, nearly all (93 percent) of campaign-linked responses were opposed to the Commission’s proposal, although so were 87 percent of all submissions.

Oof! So even if you exclude the campaign-linked responses, the overwhelming majority of those who responded don’t want an EU-wide tax on vapes and pouches.

You can see a detailed analysis of the consultation responses here. The only group in society who gave majority support to the proposals were NGOs, and even then only by a majority of 58% to 42%.

It must be dispiriting for a vast network of full time prohibitionists to have so much money and so little public support. Their repeated attempts to disparage the process shows how rattled they are, but they have no reason to worry. Since when did the European Commission ever listen to the public?