Zyn Taxes

Destroying health and ending lives

You stumble out of bed, eyes barely open. Make your way to your favorite chair, going slowly so as to not fall over in your half asleep condition. Open the little box on the table next to you, your nostrils picking up the familiar smell. Take a cigarette, put it between your lips. Flick a lighter to life, touch its flame to the tip. Inhale the warm smoke, hard and deep.

Instantly the nicotine hits.

Seemingly every neural pathway in your brain lights up in a single instant of time. Nerves begin going off like fireworks. Thoughts race through the mind.

This is, to me, the exact effect I experience with the very first cigarette of the day.

Not any of the cigarettes that come after it in a day, those simply maintain. It is that first cigarette that is so very glorious.

That exact experience is why it is so very hard for a smoker to ever successfully quit cigarettes.

I know this first hand. I spent more years than I want to remember as a two pack a day man. The good ones, Marlboro Reds.

No other nicotine product can replicate this effect. I know this too, because I’ve used, and loved them all.

Nothing else can deliver enough nicotine fast enough to produce the effect. Only cigarettes. Again, that is why it is so difficult for a cigarette user to ever successfully quit. The memory of that effect, and the craving to experience it, lasts a lifetime.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

There’s a problem though. And undoubtedly it’s a serious one.

Smoking cigarettes is a slow form of suicide. One cigarette at a time, forty cigarettes a day, 1200 cigarettes a month, 14,400 cigarettes a year, each and every one contributing to a decades long suicide attempt.

If we are honest, we must admit that this is a suicide attempt. For while cigarettes may well kill most of their users, they don’t kill all. There are those who smoke like fiends throughout a very long life.

But, even if cigarettes don’t kill us, they very badly harm our quality of life. Our general health and our body’s ability to do things goes to hell. We lose lung capacity and heart function, both of which invariably prevent us from being able to do everything that we would like to do.

No thinking being can believe it a good idea to slowly commit suicide over the course of decades, so we must quit.

If we are hooked on cigarettes we must quit them, despite it being, perhaps, the most difficult thing in the world to accomplish.

Nicotine is the drug that enhances our ability to think. With cigarette use it is the drug responsible for switching our minds on in an instant. It is the reason humans around the world have used tobacco for as long as tobacco has been known and available.

But Nicotine doesn’t significantly harm us when used in normal quantities. It doesn’t kill us.

The byproducts of tobacco combustion kill us. Not the nicotine our bodies absorb when we inhale the smoke from a burning tobacco plant.

That knowledge points us to a pathway of quitting. A harm reduction pathway whereby smokers can quit. A pathway whereby if we smoke we can save our own lives, and our society can save millions of lives. (And save untold billions of health care dollars.)

Long ago, when I quit cigarettes, I did so the easier way. Through nicotine replacement. I didn’t quit nicotine, I quit smoking. That forced me to give up the amazing nicotine experience that accompanied the first cigarette each and every morning, but I was able to retain all of the other benefits that come from having nicotine in the bloodstream.

I did it by giving up cigarettes and taking up oral tobacco. Dip. The good stuff, Copenhagen. A harm reduction strategy long recommended by experts in the field, yet, of course, opposed by anti tobacco zealots.

This was admittedly easier for me than most. I’ve never felt a need to spit when using dip. I have a dip of tobacco in my lip every waking moment of every day, but it is not visible, and no one ever sees me spit.

This seems to be different for most users of dip, who for whatever reason seem to feel a periodic need to spit while using it. My ability to control this undoubtedly made the transition from cigarettes to dip easier as it was vastly more socially acceptable.

The other advantage I had is simply that I’m male. The use of oral tobacco by males is vastly more socially acceptable, and vastly less weird, than it is for females. I imagine that switching from cigarettes to dip would seem like an insurmountable barrier to women who wanted to preserve their social standing.

In a very real way this effective harm reduction strategy has been out of practical reach for women.

But, the market responds.

Human beings are remarkably smart, and capitalism drives unending innovation.

Someone, somewhere, came up with the brilliant idea of nicotine pouches.

Take some tea bag like material and make a little tiny pouch. Put some inert material in it to give it some body. Add an appropriate and adequate amount of nicotine so that consumers know exactly how much is in each pouch and can purchase the strength necessary for their personal and unique needs. Splash a hint of flavor on top. Viola! A nicotine pouch.

No tobacco even needed.

I’m awfully fond of my Copenhagen dip, but as I write this essay I do so with a 15 mg strength Fre pouch under my cheek. Synthetic, non tobacco derived nicotine. Great stuff, I certainly enjoy their strangely named Lush.

Of vital importance to the harm reduction strategy, these nicotine pouches are socially acceptable. For men, and women.

I’ve never encountered any nicotine pouch user who feels a need to spit while using them. There are no loose particles to get stuck in the teeth. No strong tobacco flavors that result in bad breath. Nicotine pouches are clean, and their use is without any sort of mess. To any observer, using them looks no different than using a breath mint.

All of those things are super important if our goal as a society is to save lives, improve health, and radically reduce the costs of health care.

Unfortunately, here in Washington State, our Legislature has acted in a way that will keep people hooked on cigarettes by removing a powerful incentive for people to embrace harm reduction.

Tax policy informs consumer choice.

Cigarette smoking is a shockingly expensive habit to maintain. One of the reasons that the stop cigarettes by switching to dip harm reduction strategy has been embraced by so many former smokers is because dip is significantly less expensive. Here in Washington a tin of dip costs about the same as a pack of cigarettes, but that tin of dip lasts about twice as long as a pack of cigarettes because less is needed in order to maintain one’s habitual level of nicotine.

For the average consumer, dipping tobacco costs about half as much as smoking cigarettes.

The cost of nicotine pouches were (until January 1, 2026) about half of the cost of dip. Allowing someone who switched to them from cigarettes to realize extremely significant cost savings.

This cost savings has always been so large as to be a significant motivator pushing people into harm reduction.

Overnight, thanks to our Legislature and our Governor, the cost of nicotine pouches more than doubled. Because between the newly imposed excise tax on nicotine pouches, and the existing sales tax, more of the actual cost of the product is taxation than the product itself.

When this was being debated last year it was popularly referred to as the Zyn tax. This new Zyn tax should undoubtedly be repealed if the goal is to save lives and reduce health care costs.

Anti tobacco zealots have always resorted to the provably false argument that all forms of tobacco use are as harmful as cigarettes. Due to constant false messaging, vast numbers of people, tobacco users and not have fallen for this harm causing lie.

Undoubtedly, because of this, some Legislators who voted in favor of this new Zyn tax thought that by doing so they were helping to save lives, not understanding that they were making it much less likely for smokers to adopt an extremely effective harm reduction strategy.

Also, undoubtedly, some Legislators voted in favor of this new Zyn tax because they were looking for any new tax dollars that could help to close what they saw as an extremely large potential budget deficit. Probably not realizing that the revenue received from this new tax now will surely be offset by orders of magnitude in taxpayer paid health care costs in the future as less people embrace harm reduction due to the costs of nicotine pouches moving drastically closer to the costs of cigarettes.

If our goal as a society is to save lives, and secondarily to reduce out of control health care costs, then we can not tax non-tobacco containing nicotine pouches as if they are tobacco products.

Doing so does nothing but shut off an extremely effective harm reduction strategy, costing cigarette smokers their very lives.