i can't see that taxing would be acceptable... usually taxing is due to the government wanting us to reduce the use of eg tobacco for health and fuel for protecting resources and pollution. but with nicotine it would be like the government taxing coffee !!!
Sadly, if E-cigs become more popular, especially if they start to rival the popularity of traditional tobacco products, I don't see how not taxing nicotine containing e-liquids will be acceptable. Nicotine is after all a recreational drug.
One has to remember that in a democracy governments seldom base decisions on evidence and reason but on emotion stirred up by the popular press of the day. Tabloids in particular love to take ridiculous psuedo-moral positions on matters they have little knowledge and even less understanding of, for there to be a public outcry. It only takes one Jeremy Clarkson/Mad Mel Phillips type columnist to say how unfair it is that smokers are taxed to hell and made to go outside but vapers aren't, to start such and outcry. Just look at the insanity of sacking Dr. David Nutt or Tony Blair's refusal to answer a straight forward question about the MMR vaccine.
Evidence and reason cease to matter once someone is in government; only potential votes lost counts. And this applies all the way across the political spectrum. No party is better or worse than any other in this regard.
Unless Sly Bailey, Viscount Rothermere & Rupert Murdoch can all be persuaded that e-cigs are a powerful force for good that should be championed at every opportunity, taxation of e-liquids is an inevitability. Even if they do it will only delay the inevitable anyway, as once there are no more paper or advertising sales to be gained from such a position they will automatically take the contrary position in order to boost sales.
Without major changes to the way political parties are funded and the press being legally required to substantiate all claims they make, the taxing of e-liquid is a near certainty. The question is the timing.
Sorry if I sound cynical, but that is my reading of the current British political system. As long as vaping remains an "underground sport", we are likely to survive but once we appear "over the radar", the days of light touch regulation by Trading Standards are numbered.
I hope I am wrong but pragmatically taxation and regulation by HMRC would be massively preferable to regulation by MRHC.
I'm not advocating this position btw, just seeing it as inevitable in the current climate.
I pretty much agree with you here, but there are a handful of drugs where the dosage is pretty much administered by the patient them-self. They are few and far between though according to my knowledge/experience (I am not a Doctor/Pharmacologist). The obvious example is medicinal cannabis. In jurisdictions such as California that legally allow this, there are equivalents of e-cigs on sale, that use gas instead of electricity, to produce the much higher temperatures needed to vaporise an oil based chemical over a water based one.
Maybe extreme analgesics like Oramorph could be administered by vapouriser, but advantages may be few and expenses may be high compared to current systems.
Also remember big companies are cunning and wise. Neither Apple or Microsoft have ever done anything particularly innovative but they have both hidden their plagiarism well, used very clever marketing and aggressive business tactics to bully others out of the market, aggressively take over others and thus become dominate in their field.
Rechargeable batteries that have a 510/901 fitting could be potentially used for any number of applications as long as there are devices to fit them two. The electronics giants mentioned by the OP could easily use this to exploit the e-cig market without ever having to explicitly endorse E-cigs.
There is no reason to suspect that one or three of the current companies can't become a dominant force in the future. It's when a new industry springs up that this sort of thing happens. But if an outsider with buying power spots the opportunity first a monopoly or cartel becomes the likelihood.
Let's hope that e-cigs, the community being born on-line, takes a similar attitude to the Arab Spring, and denounces and rejects any forms of takeover by corporate interests by taking their money else where. But as I say, I am probably both naive and cynical.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see most of your predictions cone true.
