Walking the Tightrope
How Big Tobacco Learned to Love Its Enemies
Big Tobacco has mastered the art of profiting from both sides of the fight. With one hand, they clutch their pearls and nod along to flavor bans “for the children.” With the other, they parade their shiny “responsible” alternatives, IQOS, Vuse, Zyn, as proof of their enlightened commitment to harm reduction.
It’s a circus act: a tightrope walk where every wobble is rehearsed. But while the spotlight stays on them, the real innovators, the vape community and shop owners who built the market from nothing, have been shoved off stage. In Utah, I watched it happen in real time.
The MSA Money Machine
The real scandal isn’t just the bans, it’s how they’re bankrolled. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) was sold as punishment for Big Tobacco. In reality, it became an annuity that state governments can’t live without. Billions flow into state coffers every year, not because people quit smoking, but because they keep smoking.
In Utah, that money props up the Tobacco Prevention and Control Program, which spends its days lobbying to outlaw the very alternatives that might actually reduce cigarette sales. Big Tobacco doesn’t even need to bankroll these crusades because the state does it for them. The activists get to play the stern parent, wagging their fingers at vaping “for the children.” Big Tobacco waits in the wings as the prodigal son: repentant, rebranded, and eager to sell you “responsible” nicotine.
It’s not consensus, it’s collusion. Government, public health, and industry shake hands, while adults who smoke and vape pay the price with fewer choices and higher costs.
Bootleggers & Baptists in a Bad Marriage
Economist Bruce Yandle once explained how strange coalitions form around regulation. “Bootleggers and Baptists” was his phrase. The Baptists supply the moral fervor. In his example, calling for Sunday liquor bans. The bootleggers quietly cheer them on, because banning legal alcohol sales drives customers to their speakeasies.
Utah doesn’t need much help supplying Baptists. Public health officials and state-funded activists line up to preach the gospel of prohibition, declaring that flavored vapes must go “to protect the children.” On the other side, the bootleggers are Big Tobacco. They don’t need to campaign against flavors, they just sit back while the bans wipe out independent shops and funnel business toward their “state-approved” products.
It’s a toxic, codependent marriage. Utah’s moralizers get to feel righteous. Big Tobacco gets a captive market. And the abused spouse, ordinary adults who smoke and vape, are told to accept the punishment “for their own good.”
You can almost hear the vows: in sickness and in health, in taxes and in settlements, till bankruptcy do us part.
The Sin of Silence
Gregory Conley, a longtime advocate for tobacco harm reduction, recently pointed out to me on X when I criticized PMI. He said: “You’re not always the victim. PMI hasn’t lobbied to kill small independent vape shops (or even ‘illicit’ pouch brands) and they rather like seeing Altria and BAT flail in the world’s largest market. I have so little patience for this.”
And he’s right about part of it. PMI isn’t the villain swinging the axe in state legislatures. They haven’t written the bills that gutted shops like mine. But here’s where I part ways: when silence delivers the same outcome as sabotage, should we really cheer the restraint?
PMI and other Big Tobacco players may not be lobbying to crush independents, but they are certainly reaping the benefits when independents are crushed. They stand on the rubble of a market that hobbyists, entrepreneurs, and early adopters built without them, and they sell back a thinner, more expensive version of what already worked.
If they truly want to “lead” harm reduction, then leadership requires more than introducing new products. It means defending the ecosystem that made those products viable in the first place. Without flavors, without small shops, without the innovation that sprang up outside the Marlboro monopoly, there would be no market for PMI to enter.
Silence may be convenient, but it’s not neutral. It’s complicity dressed in harm-reduction branding.
Who Pays the Price
At the end of the day, the cost isn’t abstract, it lands right at the register. My customers now pay more for products that work less. The shop margins that once kept us afloat have been gutted. And the people who made vaping what it is: the tinkerers, the entrepreneurs, the early adopters, have been erased from the conversation.
Meanwhile, the narrative around nicotine has been hijacked by activists and corporations who talk about “the public good” while ignoring the adults right in front of them. To them, freedom of choice is a rounding error. To us, it’s our livelihood, our health, and our dignity.
The bootleggers and the Baptists will keep their little bargain as long as it suits them. But they’re not the ones footing the bill. That invoice is paid every day by ordinary adults.
If Big Tobacco truly believes in harm reduction, it’s time to stop walking the tightrope alone. They should extend a hand to independents, defend the rights of the shops and innovators who created this market, and put real weight behind protecting the diversity that makes harm reduction possible. Because without the community that built vaping, there won’t be a market left to sustain, and harm reduction itself will collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
Truly eye opening article. Prohibitionists win and those that seek harm reduction lose. The age cigarettes returns.