FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: 12 March 2025
Increased excise duty tax on vaping products is a blow to harm reduction efforts
Johannesburg – Consumer advocacy group Vaping Saved My Life (VSML) strongly condemns the government’s decision to increase excise duties on vaping products, calling it a major setback for harm reduction in South Africa. The 2025 Budget, announced by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana, imposes a 14c per ml excise duty tax on vaping liquids, making safer alternatives less accessible to smokers while fueling the illegal trade of nicotine products.
“The government claims to prioritise public health, yet it continues to make harm-reducing alternatives unaffordable for the very smokers who are trying to quit,” says Kurt Yeo, Co-Founder at VSML. “By increasing taxes on vaping products, the government is pushing smokers back to cigarettes, which are far more harmful.”
A call for a freeze on excise duties for vaping products
According to the World Health Organization, tobacco kills more than eight million people annually worldwide. This includes over seven million deaths resulting from direct tobacco use and approximately 1.3 million deaths attributed to non-smokers who are exposed to second-hand smoke.
Smoking rates are declining in the developed world because more smokers are switching to less harmful e-cigarettes, vapes, and other non-traditional tobacco products. Taxing vaping products has been proven to undermine efforts aimed at reducing smoking rates.
“Vaping is a less harmful alternative to smoking tobacco, and that has been proven by existing research. According to Public Health England, switching from smoking to vaping can lead to a 95% reduction in health risks associated with nicotine consumption. By making vaping more expensive through taxation, smokers may be deterred from making the switch and instead continue or revert back to smoking traditional cigarettes.
“We would like to make a plea to the government to consider a proposal to put an excise duty freeze on vaping products and to consider it as a cessation method to help people to quit smoking cigarettes. This is in the context that the government does not have any existing cessation programme that smoking addicts have,” Yeo adds.
Instead of reducing smoking-related harm, excessive taxation will drive smokers toward the illicit market, where unregulated and potentially unsafe products thrive. Similar trends have been observed in other countries with high excise duties on vaping, undermining public health efforts and reducing government tax revenue.
Furthermore, given that the stated purpose of imposing an excise on vaping products was to discourage initiation by nicotine naïve citizens, especially the youth, it is bewildering that the SA Treasury has not provided evidence that this tax is achieving the desired result. We are unaware of what mechanism Treasury relies on to measure the success or failure of implementing the excise, strengthening the belief that this was just another revenue stream for the government to exploit.
VSML urges the government to reconsider its approach and adopt a balanced, evidence-based taxation policy distinguishing harmful and reduced-risk products. “If the goal is truly to reduce smoking-related harm, then policies should make harm-reduction alternatives more accessible, not less,” Yeo concludes.
ENDS
For more info and interviews, contact:
Kurt Yeo
Co-Founder: VSML
kurt@vsml.co.za