Stop weaponising the youth in a paternalistic anti-vaping crusade

Mail & Guardian

16-05-2025

Vapes represent a significant harm reduction tool that can see tobacco smoking rates plummet in the future, and flavours play an essential role in this equation.
The anti-consumer choice reach of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has extended further than its stated aim of decreasing tobacco smoking to those methods, primarily vaping, that smokers prefer to cut their nasty habit. The government is not innocent in this attack on personal autonomy and harm reduction.
This year marks 20 years since the FCTC was adopted by the busybodies at the World Health Organisation (WHO) and its World Health Assembly member states.
In commemoration — perhaps, in commiseration — of this anniversary, the World Vapers' Alliance issued its Rethinking Tobacco Control report, which notes among other things that smoking rates are falling in countries that have embraced innovation in harm reduction, Sweden, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
Vapes and e-cigarettes are a huge part of this innovative approach.
Public Health England's insights into vaping being some 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes is a foremost consideration.
Research in 2020 by Dr Abigail Friedman and SiQing Xu also concludes that vape flavours play a significant role in adult cessation of tobacco smoking.
In 2021, a group of 10 researchers (Dr Lin Li, Dr Ron Borland and others) concluded similarly that 'Use of fruit and other sweet-flavored e-liquids is positively related to smokers' transition away from cigarettes.'
The UK's National Health Service's Better Health initiative also notes that 'vaping is less harmful than smoking. It's also one of the most effective tools for quitting smoking.'
While the FCTC contains an offhanded reference to harm reduction in its definition of 'tobacco control' — thus one of the things countries are presumably encouraged to do — it goes no further. In fact, its provisions on tobacco control have been construed by its own conferences of the parties (COP) to apply against vaping.
South Africa's Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, first introduced in 2018, uncritically incorporates much of the COP 2016's anti-vaping recommendations.
One of these includes the FCTC's misguided approach to 'product attractiveness'. The Bill allows the minister of health, in recent years a post occupied exclusively by prohibitionists who care little for civil liberty, to adopt virtually any regulations regarding vape aesthetics and flavouring. There are no guardrails on this power that compel the minister's rules to be in line with the best scientific information.
Do not be fooled. This is part of the same misguided ideology that informed the failed 'plain packaging' experiment, in which all cigarettes would be sold unbranded in identical packaging.
The thinking goes that people who might otherwise not smoke might just be so bedazzled by the colourful branding and advertising that they decide to try it out for size after all. Similarly, now there is the idea that people who do not smoke or vape begin vaping because of the nice flavours.
It is a condescending approach to public policymaking.
Based on past conduct, and no doubt guided by the COP and FCTC establishment, it is more than likely that the minister will use the power to regulate vape flavours to undermine the strides that vaping has made in reducing the harm of smoking cigarettes.
The South African health ministry's approach to regulating smoking and vaping — like the FCTC itself — has been characterised by ideological (rather than scientific) approaches, exemplified by the stubborn resistance to technological innovation as a means of fighting tobacco.
All this, of course, is based on five of the most dangerous words in the English language: But think of the children!
One of the rules of thumb I have developed over more than a decade in the policy analysis space is this: when politicians say, 'But think of the children!' as a justification for their actions, sit up and look for the ulterior motive.
The international crusade against, of all things, vape flavours, is no exception.
Why, one might ask, would regulators and politicians be against something so evidently innocuous? Well, the children, of course. Flavoured vaping, it is said, encourages the non-smoking youth to get into vaping.
Make no mistake: there can be no freedom left for anyone, whatsoever, if we accept this logic.
We must ban knives because a child might get hold of one and hurt themselves. In fact, as a species, we must cease using electricity because children might just stick something in electrical sockets. Cars should be banned because kids sometimes run into the road without looking.
But we won't do any of these things, because we understand that it is the responsibility of parents and communities to provide guidance and supervision for the most vulnerable members of society. Life must go on, with adults making free choices about their lives without interference from busybody politicians, and guardians must help children navigate this complex reality.
When children accidentally cut themselves, shock themselves, get hit by cars or begin smoking or vaping, this is not a problem caused by too much consumer freedom or too little state regulation. It is, instead, a failure of parenting and community oversight. And if it becomes endemic, it is a failure of culture.
The solution to cultural failure is never to ask the very same politicians who comprise the cultural elite to award themselves with more power.
Vapes represent a significant harm reduction tool that can see tobacco smoking rates plummet in the future, and flavours play an essential role in this equation. While nothing is ever perfectly safe or healthy, if society could succeed in weeding out most smoking, without coercing smokers, of course, in exchange for vaping, it would be a monumental achievement and a victory for public health.
By attacking vape flavours, we run the risk that many who might otherwise have quit smoking instead stick with the habit.
If the government had not allowed our state sovereignty to be so effortlessly disregarded by the WHO's 'experts' and their one-size-fits-all centralist designs, our health professionals — guided by our constitutional commitment to individual freedom — would probably have come to the same conclusion as other jurisdictions about this grand opportunity.
If South Africa and other signatories to the FCTC are serious about public health, their approach must include encouraging harm reduction methods while respecting the consumer choice of smokers and vapers. Rather than suppressing flavoured vapes, it should be regarded as one of the better ways to reduce smoking.
It is high time that the FCTC — and South Africa's Tobacco Bill — be revised in this respect.
Martin van Staden is the South African policy fellow at the
in the US and head of policy at the Free Market Foundation.