Old Goat
Administrator
If it wasn’t for the COVID ban, I probably would never have started mixing my own juice.
There you go. My little contribution to the government’s unintended consequences department.
I doubt “teach this grumpy bastard to make e-liquid” was written anywhere in the plan. But that’s what happened on my side.
And that’s the problem with making rules for people as though they’re furniture. People move. They adapt. They find another way.
Close the legal shop and the customer doesn’t evaporate. He’s still standing there, nicotine dependence intact, wondering where the hell he’s going to get his next bottle or packet.
Someone will offer to help.
Whether that someone pays tax is another question entirely.
We should know this by now. We’ve already paid for the lesson.
During South Africa’s 2020 tobacco sales ban, legal cigarette sales stopped. Cigarette buying carried on. Research into the market during the ban documented continuing purchases and sharply inflated prices.
Congratulations. We managed to make smoking more expensive while handing the transaction to people operating outside the legal market. Quite an achievement, if your ambition was to make a bad situation worse. cramsurvey.org
Now, the illicit cigarette trade didn’t crawl out of an egg in March 2020. It was already here. Nor was every dodgy packet necessarily smuggled across a border. Blaming the whole mess on a bloke climbing through a fence would let far too much of the local supply chain off the hook.
But the ban gave existing illegal sellers something every business wants: customers who previously bought elsewhere.
And reopening the shops didn’t necessarily send those customers back.
A UCT research conference abstract published in June 2025 found that, among smokers buying legal brands before the ban, those who bought historically illicit brands during it were 17 percentage points more likely to buy illicit brands three years later than those who bought historically legal brands during the ban.
It’s a conference abstract, so I’m not going to dress it up as the final word on everything. But that finding deserves a bit more attention than a shrug. It suggests the buying habits outlasted the ban. www.tobaccoinduceddiseases.org
You introduced the customer to another supplier.
What did you expect? A tearful farewell and the deletion of the WhatsApp number when legal sales resumed?
People aren’t waiting for permission to remember where they got something cheaper.
Which brings me to vaping, excise, and a warning that was apparently clear enough to write down before we started.
Vaping Saved My Life — VSML raised this with Parliament back in 2022.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Open Parliament’s report dated 1 December 2022, find section 5.9, and read it.
VSML warned that taxing e-liquid could push consumers towards making their own, buying from the black market or returning to smoking. It also argued for more education and help with quitting. www.parliament.gov.za
The vaping excise started on 1 June 2023. The warning came first. www.sars.gov.za
There it is. Dated. Filed. Sitting in the paperwork.
No crystal ball required. Just somebody willing to read the bloody submission.
Does that prove everyone went to the black market or back to cigarettes? Of course it doesn’t. I’m not replacing one load of bullshit with another because this version happens to suit my argument.
It proves the consequences were raised beforehand. Now we need to know what actually happened.
And I’d like rather better answers than “we collected some money”.
How many smokers switched to vaping? How many stayed off cigarettes? How many customers stopped buying through compliant shops? How many went back to smoking? What happened to affordability?
Those are the questions that tell us whether this is working.
A revenue total tells us how much came in. It doesn’t tell us where the missing customers went.
Treasury and SARS’s October 2023 response slides record objections about the rate and requests for a freeze. Government described it as introductory, referred to international comparisons and said adjustments would be considered through the budget process. www.sars.gov.za
Fine. Then checking the results should be part of the job.
You don’t get to turn the dial, walk away and declare the machine fixed because it’s making a different noise.
And yes, a tax is different from a ban. I know. The goat can distinguish a calculator from a padlock.
The COVID experience doesn’t prove that vaping excise will produce identical results. It does give us a very good reason to stop treating the legal market as though customers have nowhere else to go.
The compliant shop has rent, staff, paperwork and obligations. It’s visible. You can inspect it. You can hold it accountable.
Make its products harder to afford and the customer may start looking elsewhere. That possibility needs measuring and proper enforcement, especially when “elsewhere” includes sellers who don’t trouble themselves with the same obligations.
Otherwise, the bloke doing things properly becomes the easiest bloke to squeeze.
That strikes me as a spectacularly stupid incentive.
My own response to the ban was to learn to mix. I’m glad I learned. But I’m not going to pretend every person has the time, equipment or interest to do that responsibly.
DIY requires care. Accurate measurements. Suitable ingredients. Proper nicotine handling and labelling. “My mate knows a guy with a drum” is not a quality assurance programme.
People need trustworthy options they can actually afford.
And let me be clear about who I want those options for: adult smokers trying to get away from cigarettes.
If you’ve never smoked, I’m not here to sell you a nicotine habit. There’s enough expensive nonsense in life without volunteering for another dependency.
Keep products away from children. Enforce age restrictions. Go after dishonest sellers and unknown contents. Give responsible businesses clear standards and hold them to them.
Then give the smoker a fighting chance.
Because somewhere underneath all the tax tables and policy arguments is a person trying to stop buying cigarettes. Someone who found a setup and a juice that finally worked for them, and now has to make the monthly budget work too.
That person deserves more consideration than being treated as a convenient little revenue stream with lungs.
I’m also not pretending I have no commercial interest here. I mix and sell juice. You should know that when you read my opinion. You should also be able to follow the links and decide whether the argument stands up.
My position is simple: if reducing smoking is the objective, show us what happened to the smokers.
Don’t just show us the money.
We’ve already seen that buying habits can survive the policy that helped create them. The ban changed mine. It pushed me into mixing, and reopening the shops didn’t make me unlearn it.
VSML warned about the possible consequences of vaping excise before it began. We should be examining those consequences now, while there’s still a chance to correct mistakes.
I’d much rather write “they listened” than “I told you so”.
Because if somebody ends up back on cigarettes, being the clever bastard who predicted it is worth precisely fuck all.
Did the ban change where you bought your cigarettes or juice—or push you into mixing? And when the shops reopened, did you actually go back to buying the way you did before?
There you go. My little contribution to the government’s unintended consequences department.
I doubt “teach this grumpy bastard to make e-liquid” was written anywhere in the plan. But that’s what happened on my side.
And that’s the problem with making rules for people as though they’re furniture. People move. They adapt. They find another way.
Close the legal shop and the customer doesn’t evaporate. He’s still standing there, nicotine dependence intact, wondering where the hell he’s going to get his next bottle or packet.
Someone will offer to help.
Whether that someone pays tax is another question entirely.
We should know this by now. We’ve already paid for the lesson.
During South Africa’s 2020 tobacco sales ban, legal cigarette sales stopped. Cigarette buying carried on. Research into the market during the ban documented continuing purchases and sharply inflated prices.
Congratulations. We managed to make smoking more expensive while handing the transaction to people operating outside the legal market. Quite an achievement, if your ambition was to make a bad situation worse. cramsurvey.org
Now, the illicit cigarette trade didn’t crawl out of an egg in March 2020. It was already here. Nor was every dodgy packet necessarily smuggled across a border. Blaming the whole mess on a bloke climbing through a fence would let far too much of the local supply chain off the hook.
But the ban gave existing illegal sellers something every business wants: customers who previously bought elsewhere.
And reopening the shops didn’t necessarily send those customers back.
A UCT research conference abstract published in June 2025 found that, among smokers buying legal brands before the ban, those who bought historically illicit brands during it were 17 percentage points more likely to buy illicit brands three years later than those who bought historically legal brands during the ban.
It’s a conference abstract, so I’m not going to dress it up as the final word on everything. But that finding deserves a bit more attention than a shrug. It suggests the buying habits outlasted the ban. www.tobaccoinduceddiseases.org
You introduced the customer to another supplier.
What did you expect? A tearful farewell and the deletion of the WhatsApp number when legal sales resumed?
People aren’t waiting for permission to remember where they got something cheaper.
Which brings me to vaping, excise, and a warning that was apparently clear enough to write down before we started.
Vaping Saved My Life — VSML raised this with Parliament back in 2022.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Open Parliament’s report dated 1 December 2022, find section 5.9, and read it.
VSML warned that taxing e-liquid could push consumers towards making their own, buying from the black market or returning to smoking. It also argued for more education and help with quitting. www.parliament.gov.za
The vaping excise started on 1 June 2023. The warning came first. www.sars.gov.za
There it is. Dated. Filed. Sitting in the paperwork.
No crystal ball required. Just somebody willing to read the bloody submission.
Does that prove everyone went to the black market or back to cigarettes? Of course it doesn’t. I’m not replacing one load of bullshit with another because this version happens to suit my argument.
It proves the consequences were raised beforehand. Now we need to know what actually happened.
And I’d like rather better answers than “we collected some money”.
How many smokers switched to vaping? How many stayed off cigarettes? How many customers stopped buying through compliant shops? How many went back to smoking? What happened to affordability?
Those are the questions that tell us whether this is working.
A revenue total tells us how much came in. It doesn’t tell us where the missing customers went.
Treasury and SARS’s October 2023 response slides record objections about the rate and requests for a freeze. Government described it as introductory, referred to international comparisons and said adjustments would be considered through the budget process. www.sars.gov.za
Fine. Then checking the results should be part of the job.
You don’t get to turn the dial, walk away and declare the machine fixed because it’s making a different noise.
And yes, a tax is different from a ban. I know. The goat can distinguish a calculator from a padlock.
The COVID experience doesn’t prove that vaping excise will produce identical results. It does give us a very good reason to stop treating the legal market as though customers have nowhere else to go.
The compliant shop has rent, staff, paperwork and obligations. It’s visible. You can inspect it. You can hold it accountable.
Make its products harder to afford and the customer may start looking elsewhere. That possibility needs measuring and proper enforcement, especially when “elsewhere” includes sellers who don’t trouble themselves with the same obligations.
Otherwise, the bloke doing things properly becomes the easiest bloke to squeeze.
That strikes me as a spectacularly stupid incentive.
My own response to the ban was to learn to mix. I’m glad I learned. But I’m not going to pretend every person has the time, equipment or interest to do that responsibly.
DIY requires care. Accurate measurements. Suitable ingredients. Proper nicotine handling and labelling. “My mate knows a guy with a drum” is not a quality assurance programme.
People need trustworthy options they can actually afford.
And let me be clear about who I want those options for: adult smokers trying to get away from cigarettes.
If you’ve never smoked, I’m not here to sell you a nicotine habit. There’s enough expensive nonsense in life without volunteering for another dependency.
Keep products away from children. Enforce age restrictions. Go after dishonest sellers and unknown contents. Give responsible businesses clear standards and hold them to them.
Then give the smoker a fighting chance.
Because somewhere underneath all the tax tables and policy arguments is a person trying to stop buying cigarettes. Someone who found a setup and a juice that finally worked for them, and now has to make the monthly budget work too.
That person deserves more consideration than being treated as a convenient little revenue stream with lungs.
I’m also not pretending I have no commercial interest here. I mix and sell juice. You should know that when you read my opinion. You should also be able to follow the links and decide whether the argument stands up.
My position is simple: if reducing smoking is the objective, show us what happened to the smokers.
Don’t just show us the money.
We’ve already seen that buying habits can survive the policy that helped create them. The ban changed mine. It pushed me into mixing, and reopening the shops didn’t make me unlearn it.
VSML warned about the possible consequences of vaping excise before it began. We should be examining those consequences now, while there’s still a chance to correct mistakes.
I’d much rather write “they listened” than “I told you so”.
Because if somebody ends up back on cigarettes, being the clever bastard who predicted it is worth precisely fuck all.
Did the ban change where you bought your cigarettes or juice—or push you into mixing? And when the shops reopened, did you actually go back to buying the way you did before?