The Great Prohibitionist Convergence

When Health Rhetoric Masks a Return to Moral Policing: Governments Revive Old Reflexes While Ignoring the Science of Harm Reduction

From Luxembourg to Islamabad, from Quito to Ottawa, through the regulatory fog of Brussels, the punitive theater of Moscow, and the quiet erasures of Bern, a subterranean thread links nations that, on the surface, share nothing.

These countries share no specific ideology, no formal alliance, no treaty of intent. Yet they move in eerie synchrony. What binds them is not doctrine, but disposition: a deep, instinctive recoil from the ambiguity nicotine still represents. Or more precisely, from the controlled transgression it implies, the possibility that not all risk is equal, and that some forms of mitigation are not only possible but preferable.

What unfolds across jurisdictions is not a mosaic of tailored public health strategies but rather the solidification of a global regulatory mood. It is a mood cloaked in the poetry of protection but animated by a politics of refusal: refusal to differentiate, to calibrate, or to imagine transitions rather than closures.

Vaping products, nicotine pouches, and heated tobacco, however imperfect, are not merely regulated; they are neutralized. Advertising becomes a threat. Risk is not assessed; instead, it is criminalized. Science is cited, but rarely applied.

We still call it policy. But what we are witnessing is performance: morality in the costume of method, fear of novelty dressed as public interest. It is, above all, a refusal to think in degrees.

And in that refusal lies the central paradox. Tobacco, combusted, lethal, tax-rich, remains legal and embedded. What faces elimination are its less harmful alternatives. This is not a coordinated conspiracy; it is a convergence of habits: bureaucratic mimicry, symbolic legislation, normative inertia.

Each country chooses its instrument: taxation, litigation, invisibilization, threshold-setting, aesthetic control. But the gesture is shared. Erase what unsettles before it becomes legible.

Nine national cases, each revealing a different aspect of the same trend: the normalization of a public health logic that punishes substitution while accepting the status quo. It is a logic that speaks in the name of protection, but often delivers its opposite: a slow entrenchment of harm under the sign of safety.

And only one counter-movement. A momentary refusal to regulate further.

This is not a ban on tobacco. It is a global rehearsal for banning its alternatives. And there the politics of harm reduction meet their quietest, and perhaps most effective, antagonist: the administrative shrug that turns complexity into prohibition, and calls it care.

Austria

When Monopoly Masquerades as Care

Behind its technical and seemingly neutral language, Austria’s old state tobacco monopoly is being quietly repurposed. What began as a fiscal tool is reemerging as a mechanism of control, and public health is invoked not as an objective but as an alibi.

The Finance Committee of the National Council has approved a bill extending the tobacco monopoly to nicotine pouches and introducing a licensing system for e-liquids used in vaping. Sales would be restricted to tobacconists and a limited number of authorized outlets, and new taxation schemes would be implemented. The proposal now moves to the plenary.

A state-led distribution model is not inherently problematic. When operated with transparency, public oversight, and civic deliberation, it can even align commercial activity with collective health goals. But according to the local press, that is not what is happening here. Rather than modernizing the regulatory framework to address new technologies and risk profiles, Austria is extending an obsolete model as if the new were merely a linear extension of the old.

By subjecting significantly lower-risk products to the same regulatory regime as traditional tobacco, the Austrian government chooses not to differentiate. Treating the new as a mere extension of the old is a deliberate act. Rather than asking what kind of regulation would be proportionate to the specific risks posed by pouches and e-liquids, the state incorporates them into a framework designed for another era, one built for a different threat and a different logic of fiscal extraction.

In doing so, it ignores a crucial opportunity: to use regulation as a tool for harm reduction. The state could have positioned itself as a responsible arbiter, steering consumption toward less harmful practices and abandoning the illusion of “protective prohibition.” Instead, it chooses to preserve the instrument, the monopoly, at the cost of the objective.

The result is a predictable fusion of impulses: on one side, the fiscal logic that seeks to monetize new products; on the other, the paternalistic instinct to control behavior through regulated scarcity.

The monopoly, once a mechanism for revenue and concentration, now becomes a mechanism of containment, narrowing the spaces in which alternative nicotine practices might emerge. Access is funneled through a narrow network of politically connected retailers. And the unspoken message is unmistakable: any deviation from the traditional tobacco model will only be tolerated if it passes through the old gatekeepers.

This is a conservative reflex in the structural sense. Confronted with innovation, the state does not experiment; it recentralizes. It does not recalibrate its rules to fit emerging practices; it forces the new into the mold of the old. In doing so, it forfeits the most subtle and promising function of modern regulation: the ability to signal relative risk, to enable safer substitutions, and to open legitimate pathways away from combustion.

If public health were truly the central aim, risk differentiation and regulatory transparency would be non-negotiable. A state model consistent with that goal would subject products to independent health assessments, tax them according to their relative harm, and publicly justify its licensing and distribution decisions. It would also enable contestation, not as a concession, but as a principle.

But what we see, at least in the press, is the opposite. The current legislative proposal does not construct a public health policy; it reinforces a monopoly. Under the banner of protection, it preserves a fiscal and regulatory structure that serves more to perpetuate itself than to reduce harm. What is ultimately being protected is not just the public body but the architecture of the monopoly: its logic, its channels, its beneficiaries.

At the heart of this maneuver lies an uncomfortable paradox: a state that invokes the language of modernization to impose, in practice, an outdated model. The supposed “update” of the monopoly does not incorporate innovations in alternative nicotine delivery systems, nor does it address the urgency of replacing more harmful practices. It simply captures the new and domesticates it, transforming it into more of the same, provided it bears the authorized seal of power. And it is in that gesture that the masquerade falls apart.

Bulgaria

The Disposable Vape Ban and the Geopolitics of Regulatory Vacuum

At first glance, it appears to be another technical dispute within the European Union. Bulgaria proposes banning disposable vaping devices, whether they contain nicotine or not, and the European Commission and the Italian government respond with carefully worded legal opinions. But beneath the formal language lies a deeper understanding: the silent unraveling of the EU’s regulatory architecture regarding nicotine products.

The Commission’s opinion questions the compatibility of the Bulgarian bill with the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), particularly with respect to health warnings and ingredient transparency. Its central critique targets Bulgaria’s blanket ban on sensory references on packaging, such as flavors and aromas, a measure that may conflict with the TPD’s principles of consumer information and clarity.

Italy, meanwhile, sidesteps the vaping issue and directs its objection elsewhere: the bill’s restrictions on energy drinks. According to Rome, such measures would violate the principle of the free movement of goods within the internal market, underscoring that even in public health disputes, commercial interests remain a core fault line.

What seems like a technical standoff is, in fact, a deeper conflict: the attempt by a peripheral state to impose some order on a fragmented regulatory landscape one shaped, or at least tolerated, by Brussels.

Bulgaria’s proposal goes beyond public health. It responds to the absence of clear EU guidance and to a regulatory vacuum that has enabled the unchecked proliferation of products, formats, and business models operating outside coherent oversight.

By demanding “alignment” with the TPD, the European Commission casts itself as the guardian of a coherence it helped fracture. There lies the paradox: the center demands order, yet refuses to acknowledge that much of the disorder was bred by the silence or complacency of its own directives.

In this regulatory vacuum, member states such as Bulgaria legislate by saturation. Instead of tailoring measures to distinct risk profiles or patterns of use, they adopt maximalist strategies: total bans. Regulation becomes a barricade rather than a tool of mediation.

Yet even if the Bulgarian bill responds to a real institutional gap, its execution risks turning exception into rule: by treating nicotine and non-nicotine products alike, by banning sensory cues that support harm reduction, and by collapsing nuance in the name of regulatory simplicity, it threatens to undermine public health gains made through safer alternatives.

The result is a standoff with two faces: on one side, Brussels’ paralysis sketching directives while avoiding substantive commitments; on the other, a member state trying to fill the void with extreme measures, but without the technical deliberation such decisions demand.

The double risk is evident: that the EU will miss the opportunity to build a more effective common framework, and that its members, acting alone, may replace regulatory chaos with blind rigidity, equally distant from science, bioethics, and informed citizenship.

Canada

When the State Files a Lawsuit Against the Alternative

In British Columbia, long praised as a progressive beacon, public health policy against vaping has taken a new, symbolic turn: the state now goes to court not merely to regulate but to punish what should be an alternative.

In December 2025, the province passed the Vaping Product Damages and Health Care Costs Recovery Act (Bill 24). This legal framework allows the government to sue manufacturers, distributors, consultants, and even corporate directors and officers to recover public health care costs allegedly caused by vaping-related illness.

The law looks not to the future but to the past.

Its provisions are retroactive, enabling lawsuits for “vaping-related wrongs” regardless of when they occurred, provided the claim is filed within 15 years of the Act’s enforcement or the discovery of harm. Even more troubling: courts may rely on ministerial certificates as conclusive evidence of healthcare costs, allowing judgments to rest on projections and aggregated data rather than individual evidence.

But damage is only half the story.

The scope of liability has been radically redrawn. Responsibility now extends beyond companies to individual executives, even for alleged wrongdoing predating the law itself. The presumption of innocence is subverted by a retroactive framework that undermines fundamental legal protections.

The government frames the bill as a tool to reclaim public costs from e-cigarette use, echoing the lawsuits of the 1990s against Big Tobacco. However, this analogy is forced, even grotesque. What was once a legal strategy against the deadliest consumer product in modern history is now indiscriminately applied to a landscape of lower-risk products and evolving consumer practices.

The consequences are stark: products with distinct harm profiles are collapsed into a single legal category. Non-combustible devices are judged as though they were cigarettes. The principle of harm proportionality, essential to any ethical public health model, is replaced with a punitive logic that flattens all distinctions.

The paradox is glaring. Cigarettes, mass killers for over a century, remain legal, widely sold, and fiscally sound. Meanwhile, producers of safer alternatives face retroactive lawsuits and personal liability. The message to the market is clear and perverse: stay with the known killer, and you’re safe; try innovating, and you’re a target.

A state truly committed to public health would design law and liability to reflect risk and support substitution. British Columbia chooses another path: it repurposes the apparatus of punishment, cloaks it in the language of health, and asserts its right to define which risks are legitimate and which are threats.

In this system, it is not the high risk that elicits the fiercest response, but the effort to leave it behind through means beyond the state’s control. That is the quiet inversion at work: public health rhetoric is weaponized, not to reduce harm, but to discipline attempts to reconfigure it. Here, the message and boundary between protection and repression becomes uncomfortably thin.

Ecuador

When Regulation Becomes an Act of Moral Faith

Ecuador stands at a legislative crossroads. Under the banner of updating its tobacco control policies, the country is advancing a proposal that appears to be driven more by moral conviction than by scientific evidence.

Congresswoman Cristina Jácome, representing the province of Guayas, has introduced a bill to reform forty articles of the 2011 Organic Law for the Regulation and Control of Tobacco. Yet rather than modernizing through nuance, the draft reinforces a familiar logic: homogeneous control over profoundly heterogeneous risks.

The diagnosis is valid. The industry has changed: electronic devices have proliferated, digital marketing circumvents traditional regulations, and consumer patterns have diversified. But Jácome’s legislative response is strikingly monolithic.

According to the Assembly’s official summary, the bill bans advertising and sponsorship of all tobacco and nicotine products, imposes transparency obligations on the industry, regulates points of sale, strengthens enforcement mechanisms, establishes sanctions, and enables citizen reporting, without distinguishing between combustible and non-combustible products.

On paper, products with vastly different harm profiles: cigarettes, vapes, heated tobacco, and nicotine-free devices are folded into a single regulatory framework.

Vapor and smoke, exposure and combustion, direct and residual risk: all are treated alike. The result is not just a technical misstep but an epistemological one: regulation ceases to mediate risk and begins to encode moral certainty.

This erases a central tenet of evidence-based public health: proportionality to harm.

Scientific consensus confirms that combustion is the primary driver of nicotine-related illness and death. Non-combustible products, while not risk-free, typically result in significantly lower toxicant exposure and can support complete switching away from cigarettes. Harm-reduction-oriented regulatory models recognize this and design regimes that, while protecting youth, create space for safer transitions.

The Ecuadorian bill goes in the opposite direction. Rather than calibrating measures by product type and risk level, it imposes blanket restrictions: the same tools, the same rhetoric, the same legal treatment.

In updating its control architecture, legal definitions, fiscal duties, education, advertising, customs, and sanctions, the proposal also homogenizes these areas. And in doing so, it forfeits the most effective policy lever for reducing tobacco-related disease: informational and regulatory incentives to move away from combustion.

What remains is a traditional control paradigm. More akin to secular catechism than to technical design. In its effort to protect health, the law risks enshrining the most dangerous form of consumption by refusing to acknowledge risk differentials. The problem isn’t regulation itself, but applying a uniform standard to wildly different realities.

Ultimately, the proposal reflects a legitimate concern but responds with a punitive, rather than pedagogical, gesture. Instead of educating through nuance, it regulates through equivalence. Instead of enabling transition, it constrains it.

In doing so, it replaces science with moralism, treating nicotine not as a substance to be managed, but as a heresy to be suppressed, even when the altar is public health.

France

The Senate and the Shape of Caution

In France, the Senate has chosen not to rush forward. At a time when nicotine product regulation is leaning toward greater restriction, the upper house of Parliament intervened to pause, at least temporarily, a set of measures that would have tightened control over vaping devices.

During the review of the 2025 Finance Bill, Senators adopted amendments that removed three key provisions from Article 23: banning online sales of vapour products, introducing a dedicated excise tax, and restricting retail to licensed tobacconists. They also rejected proposals to establish a regulatory framework for nicotine pouches, which currently lack specific legal recognition.

On the surface, these appear to be technical budgetary decisions. But substantively, they suspend three significant constraints: closing an entire access channel (online), concentrating distribution into a single, state-licensed network, and imposing a new fiscal layer before a coherent regulatory structure is in place.

Regarding nicotine pouches, the Senate declined to regulate, not in endorsement, but in recognition that a meaningful framework has yet to be built. The choice was to defer rather than overreach.

The Senate’s action reflects institutional caution: a refusal to preemptively layer new restrictions that, depending on their design, could hinder access to alternatives or drive demand underground.

The Senate is not articulating a harm-reduction strategy, at least not explicitly. But by removing provisions that would have simultaneously narrowed access, centralized sales, and introduced excise taxes without a comprehensive framework, the chamber has postponed regulatory choices with real ethical and practical stakes for those trying to leave cigarettes behind.

This is not an institutional rupture, but a temporary brake. Still, the hesitation is telling. It reveals how, within a single legal system, different institutions may diverge on how fast and how far to regulate products that sit at the intersection of risk, autonomy, and transition.

Caution, in this case, is not delay; it is the methodical refusal to act before the ground is ready.

Israel

Regulation by Omission

In Israel, the government has approved the draft 2026 state budget. A document that, despite its fiscal title, profoundly influences daily life. Among the reported provisions are: an expanded definition of “smoked product” to include any personal-use nicotine item (even those without combustion); new excise taxes on vaping devices and refills; strict volume caps on e-liquid bottles; and sweeping licensing and reporting obligations across the supply chain.

But what stands out is not what’s written, but what isn’t. The full budget text remains unpublished. And that omission is not a bureaucratic accident; it is a technique of rule.

This is governance by concealment: when behavioral controls are embedded in spreadsheets, what materializes is regulation by stealth. What is framed as a revenue measure operates, in fact, as a disciplinary tool. The state taxes, restricts, and redefines without ever naming the prohibition.

In Israel’s case, public health policy is not declared; it is embedded. By clothing control in the neutral language of budgeting, regulation gains the power of invisibility. What ought to be subject to civic scrutiny becomes a footnote in an Excel file.

According to the proposal, a 1-shekel tax per milliliter of vape liquid will be imposed, along with a 30-shekel charge per device, whether filled or empty. Every actor in the chain, from importers to retailers, must register with the tax authority, operate only within the licensed network, and submit monthly digital reports. The legal category of “smoked product” is broadened to include any product containing nicotine, even if it involves no combustion or tobacco.

The rationale is familiar: fight the black market, protect youth. But by burying these decisions in an unpublished fiscal document, the government submerges political action at the moment it most demands visibility.

This is the architecture of silence. Regulation no longer speaks, it murmurs, encoded in fiscal language. And when silence becomes the dominant grammar of public health, citizens are left guessing what risks are being managed and what choices remain available.

The paradox is stark. Combustible cigarettes, historically the deadliest nicotine product, remain legal, taxable, and embedded in the fiscal apparatus. Meanwhile, less harmful alternatives are covertly reclassified and subject to financial penalties. A tax is never just a cost; it is also a message about legitimacy.

What’s at stake is not just the content of the law, but its form, and the manner in which it reaches the public.

When behavioral regulation is folded into budget frameworks and withheld from public scrutiny, democracy loses its transparency, even in the Netanyahu government. The invisible begins to shape the visible, and silence becomes policy.

Luxembourg

The Limit That Bans Without Saying No

In Luxembourg, a legal threshold has been set so low that it functions not as a limit, but as an erasure.

A new law, passed by the Chamber of Deputies in late October and published in the official gazette on December 1st, stipulates that nicotine pouches and so-called “new nicotine products” must not exceed 0.048 milligrams of nicotine per unit. On paper, it is a technical adjustment. In practice, it is a prohibition by other means.

The measure enters into force on January 1st, 2026.

Its logic is clean, its language measured, and its effect total. The cap is not regulatory in any functional sense; it is terminal. A vape shop owner, speaking confidentially, stated that no commercially viable product is likely to meet this threshold.

What is being enacted is not moderation but elimination, camouflaged beneath the numeric precision of toxicology.

Beyond this microdosage of permissibility, the law follows a now-familiar choreography: It bans flavors and certain additives; mandates child-resistant packaging and anti-tampering seals; extends advertising restrictions and public-use prohibitions; and applies EU-mandated health warnings to heated tobacco products.

Three months after entry into force, new labelling rules will tighten the net.

None of these measures, taken individually, would be remarkable. Together, under a limit so low it defies product viability, they function as a kind of regulatory centrifuge: a structure built not to regulate a class of products, but to spin it out of existence, without ever having to say the word “ban.”

This is the geometry of silent prohibition.

A politics of disappearance dressed in technical varnish.

The limit becomes the message.

And the message is subtraction: subtraction of nuance, of proportionality, of public deliberation.

There are moments when the law does not regulate risk, but redefines it out of being.

The Luxembourg model is one of them.

By embedding a ban inside the metrics of milligrams, it sidesteps the political cost of saying no while securing the outcome of a full negation.

What might have been a conversation about relative harm, access, and risk stratification is displaced by a single, pristine number, a number that does not govern but excludes.

Pakistan

The Rule That Restricts, and Nothing More

In Pakistan’s Senate, a bill is advancing to impose comprehensive regulation on vaping products in Islamabad, the federal capital.

Introduced by Senator Sarmad Ali of the People’s Party, the proposal includes: a ban on sales to minors; use restrictions in public places and public transport; a nicotine cap of 40 mg/ml; a prohibition on packaging deemed attractive to minors; a total ban on advertising, promotion, and sponsorship; and a rule forbidding sales within 50 meters of educational institutions.

It is a wide-ranging regulatory framework, assembled with the precision of a well-known manual. Every measure reflects a familiar repertoire: prevention, perimeter control, and access limitation. Each clause conforms to the WHO’s (Bloomberg’s) recommended template. Yet while the list is long, the orientation is singular: restriction.

What is missing, evidently, is any trace of risk differentiation, transitional strategy, or consideration of proportionality. The bill does not calibrate measures to actual product profiles or consumption patterns. Instead, it asserts regulation as a normative good in itself. Coherence here is structural and personalized, not empirical, tight, linear, and absolute.

In this respect, Islamabad mirrors a broader trend across many Global South jurisdictions: importing the strictest available model as both a token of international alignment and a form of institutional self-defense against charges of inaction. However, one key question remains: Does it work?

Regulation is necessary, but effective regulation requires more than fidelity to any imported templates. It demands evaluation, revision, and responsiveness to local contexts. It calls for asking not only what must be prohibited, but also what should be enabled. Above all, it requires a commitment to transformation, not just containment. And that element remains absent here, overshadowed by the comfort of the formal rigor of familiar yet flawed perspectives.

Russia

The Gesture That Bans Before It Understands

In Russia, legislative momentum has turned symbolic power into regulatory force. A bill approved by the Government Commission prohibits the sale and use of nicotine-containing products, whether combustible or non-combustible, at public transport stops nationwide. Only one exception remains: vending machines located in isolated communities with no other supply options. The measure is expected to take effect in September 2026, pending final parliamentary approval.

But the story did not stop at kiosks. A multiparty coalition in the State Duma, led by Yaroslav Nilov, chair of the Labor and Social Policy Committee, has proposed an amendment that would go even further: a blanket national ban on the sale of e-cigarettes and vaping liquids, regardless of nicotine content.

This escalating pattern of control reflects a broader institutional reflex: legislate before understanding, forbid before measuring.

In such a climate, the gesture and the performance of resolve matter more than the mechanism. Policy becomes posture.

Here, risk is not something to be assessed or managed. It is something to be erased, removed from public space, not through science, but through symbolic exclusion.

The vape is not understood as a technological object with a particular risk profile, but as an alien form of deviance to be neutralized before its nature becomes too visible, too complex to expel easily.

The instinct is not uniquely Russian; it echoes throughout regulatory systems that respond to novelty with prohibitive reflexes. But in this case, the strategy is particularly stark: eliminate the thing before one must explain it. Preempt nuance. Criminalize ambiguity.

The proposed ban rests on neither epidemiological modeling nor comparative risk analysis. It is driven by an urgency to reassert moral clarity defined not by proportionality but by exclusion. To legislate in this way is not to govern a public health problem; it is to exorcise an unfamiliar presence.

When the law becomes a liturgical ritual, the public policy becomes fiction; what is lost is not only the opportunity for better health outcomes but also the state's capacity to learn from what it regulates.

Switzerland

The Politics of Making Things Disappear

Switzerland’s Federal Council has launched a public consultation to revise the Tobacco Products Ordinance (TabPV) and implement the new national law adopted in mid-2025.

The proposal envisions a near-total advertising ban on tobacco and nicotine products, including e-cigarettes, across all spaces accessible to minors: digital platforms, print media, vending machines, and events.

The revised rules also require technical mechanisms for verifying age, define acceptable forms of identification, and outline conditions under which marketing can be made “invisible and inaccessible.”

These are not exceptional measures by Swiss standards. They follow the familiar pattern of high technical specificity and legal granularity. But within that precision lies a deeper political instinct: to regulate visibility itself.

Advertising is not just a commercial practice. It is also a declaration of social presence. By erasing it, the state does more than protect. It selects. It decides which products, and by extension, which choices, are allowed to appear. What begins as a public health measure becomes a form of symbolic erasure.

This is not a defense of vaping ads. It is a caution against mistaking disappearance for resolution.

When public policy equates risk with visibility and harm with mere image, it leaves the more complex realities of consumption, behavior, and motivation untouched.

What’s being restricted here is not just marketing, but narrative space.

The question is not whether regulation is warranted. It often is. The question is what kind of regulation sustains democratic clarity, rather than obscures it under layers of technical vanishing.

Switzerland’s move illustrates a broader European trend: confronting harm by erasing its image. The risk, ultimately, is not just to health but to political legibility and legitimacy.

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