Why not? Taxes are usually preferable to outright bans (which, realistically, is how governments eliminate vice), because they let you decide how much is your vice worth to you and still engage in it, with a revenue benefit to the rest of society, if you really want to.
The only scenario that makes sense is to fund programs to help people deal with the negative effects of consumption (as, theoretically, such programs would not need to exist once consumption stops). However, unless you don't believe in addiction at all, it's clearly immoral to tie funding of treatment programs entirely to excise taxes.
So you have to weigh a revenue offset against the morality of, again, taxing people who may have compromised agency to one degree or another. I think our system does less ethical things all the time, but it's hard for me to feel these kinds of taxes are "well founded."
If we had real universal healthcare (or better cost sharing) then I think a much broader tax on things that have predictable health impacts might be sensible, but for it to work it would need to go far beyond "morally questionable" things and into, say, taxing companies that employ people to do labor that will reliably damage their bodies.
That's fine. Revenue can be routed to externality abatement. When there's no more revenue, there's also less need for the abatement.
Spirit duty in the UK is £28.74 per litre of pure alcohol. A ~£20 bottle of Jack Daniels pays a tiny bit over £8 of spirit duty, which is 40% of the sale price. A £250 bottle of 25 year old single cask Glenlivet pays a tiny bit under £8 of spirit duty, around 3% of the sale price.
I don't think it's entirely reasonable that the vice tax is a rounding error for fancy drinks, but amount to almost half the price you pay for cheaper booze.
For a cross-sectional view this is certainly true. At a single point in time, a high tax rate impacts people who are more economically vulnerable more than those that are wealthier. However, does the causality hold if we consider this over time?
Addictive substances use -> economically impoverished, or economically impoverished -> addictive substances use?
To me it seems many folks use addictive substances to self medicate in absence (or in spite of) a universal healthcare system. And then when economically improving opportunities come may have less capacity to claim them.
Do we look at it this way? Does it matter? General open questions.
Governments that attempt to eliminate vice by banning inevitably simply drive it underground where it is then facilitated by dangerous black markets and criminal organizations.
In reality is it gatekeeping on vices by the wealthy. If you are wealthy, nobody cares about your vices.
How much is your vibrator worth to you?
If it was self harm, then seems like we should start with vice taxes for added sugar and not doing cardio workouts.
> vice taxes for added sugar
At face value, this doesn't seem like a bad idea. I've heard about cities in the US that have a tax on large sugary drinks.
> not doing cardio workouts
It's probably easier to incentivize the good behavior here than punish the absence of it.
The other issue is that sin taxes just don't work. They don't stop people from partaking at all. These taxes are just a money grab.
As for societal harm, I imagine going forward we'll settle on some countermeasure against entities like Facebook. If that's a per-byte transmission tax, then so be it.
But take for example suburban single-family homes. We know they are significantly worse for the environment than urban apartment living - they are harder to heat & cool, require more invasive utility work, lead to car-driven transportation instead of mass transit, and destroy natural habitats. Nevertheless, I want to live in a house, not an apartment. And if the government were to tax them according to their true environmental impact and costs, I'd suck it up and pay the tax, getting a more unpleasant but higher-paying job if necessary. (They don't currently, and I'm enjoying the sweet subsidy of our unsustainable lifestyle.)
There are other things like say soda that are unhealthy, and a tax has been proposed on them. I cut back my soda consumption because it got expensive, but sometimes I really want to relax with an IBC or Jarrito or Mexican Coke, so I'll suck it up and buy a 12-pack. That's exactly the point of a tax: cut back people's default consumption because it gets expensive, while still giving them the option of purchasing if they really want it.