The Politics of Smoke
By confusing risk with substance, and care with prohibition, the new global war on nicotine renders invisible those who need alternatives most.
In the final days of November 2025, the map of prohibition came into focus: subtle in its contours, but brutal in its effects. From Brussels to Buenos Aires, governments tightened the noose around nicotine.
The United Kingdom passed its landmark “smoke-free generation” law. France, Ireland, and Czechia imposed stricter rules. Portugal, quietly, moved to tax nicotine pouches. Mexico, Uzbekistan, and South Korea advanced toward outright bans. And Argentina, in a rare, solitary gesture, proposed a regulation.
The map was vast. But the pattern, unsettling: cigarettes endure, harm reduction disappears, and policy, in the name of protecting the future, reenacts the failures of the past.
Brussels
A Ritual of Bread and Smoke
On the table: bread, sparkling water, and a lukewarm plate of food. The scene is a working lunch in Brussels: institutional banality elevated to diplomatic ritual. But what’s really being served are carefully curated, or strategically vague, expressions drawn from the official vocabulary of European public health: “smoke-free generation,” “emerging products,” “protection of minors.”
On the agenda of the EU’s Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council (EPSCO), one item stands out, not for being controversial, but for its apparent consensus: “New tobacco and nicotine products: impact on children and youth.”
No minister wants to appear complacent in the face of the vape boom. Nor do they wish to be associated with a narrative strongly promoted by regional WHO offices and aligned NGOs that frames the continent as besieged by electronic devices and nicotine pouches, supposedly engineered to seduce children.
But what remains outside the frame also speaks volumes.
During lunch, ministers engaged in an “informal debate” on the topic. In the language of diplomacy, this often means: nothing will be decided, but positions will be floated. And even when the discourse claims the mantle of public health protection, the silences are telling. In the newly announced Critical Medicines Act, one of the EU’s flagship initiatives to ensure access to essential medicines, there’s no mention of nicotine or technologies tied to harm reduction. The substance isn’t considered “critical”, even though in much of Europe, access to cessation alternatives remains far from assured.
Nicotine, when uncoupled from the cigarette, lingers in a grey zone: pharmacologically peripheral, politically inconvenient. Invisible when that suits, visible only as a moral threat.
United Kingdom
A Generation Without Smoke; or Alternatives
The moral laboratory for generational prohibition lies not within the European Union, but right next to it, and in a way, on its fringes: the United Kingdom. The new Tobacco and Vapes Bill proposes one of the most radical iterations of this logic by permanently banning the sale of any tobacco product, including heated ones, to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009.
The narrative is simple, almost mythic: a line on the calendar separates those who may legally smoke from those who never will. A clean generational break, hopeful, compelling, and seemingly unassailable.
But the regulatory battlefield is far from settled. Several EU member states, including Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Czechia, have triggered the TRIS system, the European Commission’s technical regulation notification mechanism, to challenge the British model’s implementation in Northern Ireland, where the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) still applies under the Windsor Framework.
In submissions to the Commission, European governments voice concerns rarely aired in public. They argue that generational bans may distort the single market, restrict the free movement of goods without proper proportionality testing, and ignore less invasive alternatives such as raising the minimum purchase age to 21 or tightening tax and enforcement measures.
Portugal goes further. It points out that the UK operates in a regulatory grey zone with respect to the TPD and highlights a tangible territorial risk: pushing consumers from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland, thereby reactivating the same illicit market that any sensible public policy ought to contain, not revive.
The contradiction is severe: in the name of “protecting the young,” a policy is institutionalized that keeps cigarettes legal and socially accepted for older generations, while pushing younger ones into parallel channels—informal margins, opaque risks.
Nicotine doesn’t vanish. It simply changes hands, routes, prices, and visibility.
The Small Insert That Might Shift Everything
The same United Kingdom that is rehearsing one of the world’s strictest generational tobacco bans is, paradoxically, also flirting with a radically different logic: harm reduction. Currently underway is a policy that may seem minor but carries transformative potential: the introduction of informational inserts inside cigarette and roll-your-own tobacco packs, offering messages in support of cessation.
The public consultation, open until January 20, 2026, does not ask whether inserts should exist; that decision has already been made. The question now is how: What size should the messages be? Where will they be placed inside the packaging? How often will they rotate? What should they say? When will they take effect? None of these is a mere technicality. In a visual environment already saturated with images of rotting lungs and sickened bodies, the inserts propose a different grammar, not just one of shock, but of accompaniment.
Here, evidence speaks louder than ideology. Systematic reviews like the Cochrane Review on e-cigarettes for smoking cessation support with high certainty that nicotine-containing devices significantly improve quit rates, outperforming both traditional nicotine replacement therapies and nicotine-free e-cigarettes.
The problem is not a lack of data, but the hesitation to embed that data into regulatory design.
If the UK includes concrete alternatives, such as properly regulated vapes and pouches, and not just helpline numbers and bureaucratic slogans, they could become more than warnings. They might emerge as one of the few tools in this new regulatory wave that treats the smoker not as a potential offender, but as a moral subject, capable of choice.
Portugal
A Quiet Tax, a Loud Gesture
As most European countries tighten the regulatory noose, Portugal is experimenting with a subtle yet telling tectonic shift. The national parliament has quietly approved a symbolic measure: creating a specific tax category for nicotine pouches. Starting in 2026, the product will be taxed at €0.065 per gram, with a cap of 12 mg per unit. Though the final version of the Budget Law has yet to be fully published, preliminary drafts and industry sources confirm that the measure is part of the 2026 fiscal package.
Translated from fiscal jargon into political language, the gesture is unambiguous: the state acknowledges that nicotine pouches exist (and will continue to exist) and chooses to bring them out of the grey zone, granting them legal status, regulatory parameters, and a price.
It’s a cautious move, yes. But in the European context, it borders on heresy. If adults will continue to use nicotine, better they do so through smokeless, traceable, taxed products with evident oversight, rather than be pushed into informal markets where opacity of ingredients and regulatory blind spots become public health risks in themselves.
But tax calibration is everything. Too high a levy risks choking a nascent market or driving users back to cheap, combustible cigarettes. Too low, and it may invite abuse, the very scenario the policy seeks to prevent. What Portugal is tentatively exploring is rare: a proportionality experiment via taxation. Something widely endorsed in theory, but rarely attempted in practice.
France
Prohibition, by Other Means
While Portugal experiments with domesticating a slice of the new nicotine market, France is preparing to encircle it. The infamous Article 23 of the 2026 Finance Bill outlines a regulatory architecture of containment. If passed as written, it would impose three pivotal changes on the French vape market:
A ban on online sales of vapor products;
The creation of a special excise tax on these devices;
And restriction of in-person sales to licensed tobacconists (buralistes) and a limited number of authorized retailers, mirroring traditional tobacco rules.
The Senate’s Finance Committee has already recommended approval of the article without amendments: a clear signal of tightening. While the proposed taxation still faces pockets of resistance, the ban on online sales remains resolute. In a country where nearly 30% of vape commerce occurs online, the measure threatens to consolidate the market under the same oligopoly that controls combustible cigarettes.
From a public health perspective, the incongruity is striking: products with lower risk profiles are restricted, while cigarettes remain widely available, their distribution channels, licenses, and profit margins untouched.
It’s a regulatory architecture, oddly adequate, if the goal is to preserve the status quo.
But France’s clampdown is not airtight. Cracks are emerging. A set of proposed amendments seeks to establish a legal framework for oral nicotine products that contain neither tobacco nor combustion: nicotine pouches. The proposal includes:
A cap of 16.6 mg of nicotine per pouch;
Sales are prohibited to those under 18;
A sales monopoly reserved for tobacconists;
And a progressive tax: €22 per 1,000 grams in 2026, rising to €44 in 2027 and €66 in 2028.
The official justification is cautious, yet it lays bare the underlying tension: “a pure and simple ban risks fueling a parallel market, similar to what already exists with tobacco and narcotics.” The draft law cites cases of nicotine intoxication involving products with over 50 mg of nicotine but concedes that, when properly regulated, pouches may help reduce smoking, as demonstrated by the Swedish experience.
For now, the government has announced a ban on the sale of these products beginning in April 2026. But Parliament may yet reverse or revise that course, laying the groundwork for a regulated model with fiscal oversight, age restrictions, and public health criteria.
The French debate reveals a divided Europe: on one side, the impulse to prohibit; on the other, the effort to regulate. At the heart of this rift lies a still-unresolved strategic choice: whether to treat nicotine as a threat to be eradicated, or as a public health tool to be handled with scientific rigor, not moral reflex.
Ireland
What Disposables Erase
In Ireland, the government has introduced the Public Health (Single-Use Vapes) Bill 2025, aiming to ban the sale of disposable vapes. The official justification hinges on environmental protection and youth prevention.
By banning disposables, Ireland is removing from public view what is most visually and symbolically disruptive: brightly colored devices littering sidewalks and closely associated with youth culture. It’s a policy crafted in response to what is seen as trash, branding, and adolescence. Still, it leaves unresolved the question of what to do with what remains unseen: persistent dependence, the adult smoker seeking a safer off-ramp, and the underground markets poised to reorganize.
The aesthetics of prohibition address the problem's surface, not its structure. And without a transitional plan that ensures accessible, affordable, and less harmful reusable alternatives, the likely outcome is not a reduction in harm, but a shift in its form.
The Irish case also exposes another vulnerability: the lack of coordination between environmental and public health policies. Banning disposables may make ecological sense, but in isolation, it risks becoming just another tile in a fragmented European mosaic of disconnected reactions.
Crossing the threshold toward effective policy requires more than bans. It demands infrastructure, viable alternatives, and the political will to treat nicotine not as taboo, but as a complex problem requiring equally complex solutions.
Czechia
The War on Sweetness
With Decree 429/2025, in effect since December 1st, Czechia has intensified its restrictions on e-cigarettes, substantially amending Law 37/2017. The new regulation, accompanied by a seven-month transition period, redraws the boundaries of what can and cannot be vaporized in the country.
Banned are:
the use of sugars, sweeteners, or any substance that might “confuse the palate” with sweet notes in products lacking a “characteristic flavor”;
devices that mimic cosmetics, foods, or toys;
any additional functions beyond basic vaporization;
packaging claims suggesting environmental, health, or economic benefits.
The regulation also mandates expanded health warnings: even nicotine-free products must now carry the message, “Using this product is harmful to your health.” Symbolically, the gesture erases distinctions between nicotine and its absence, between combustion and vapor, between reduced risk and absolute risk.
But what, exactly, qualifies as a “characteristic flavor”?
The decree offers a technically precise yet culturally arbitrary definition. Permitted are: coffee, tea, tobacco, mint, or “other plants” including flowers, seeds, leaves, and their extracts, whether alone or in combination. Anything that evokes fruit, dessert, or allegedly “childlike” indulgence is banned.
Under the banner of youth protection, the regulation reenacts a familiar ritual: equalizing all risks through language. In the public messaging, louder than the technical annexes, the subtext is clear: everything is equally harmful even when it isn’t.
Turkey
From Feed to Phantom
In Turkey, the Ministry of Trade is preparing a sweeping revision of regulations governing advertising and unfair commercial practices. The centerpiece: new rules on influencer activity and an explicit ban on the promotion of tobacco products, including electronic ones, across social media and all digital platforms.
But the crackdown isn’t new. Since February 2020, Presidential Decree No. 2149 has been in force, prohibiting the import of e-cigarettes, heated tobacco devices, and any products that mimic the act of smoking, with or without nicotine. The ban is comprehensive: it extends to replacement parts, cartridges, liquid solutions, and any accessories tied to these devices.
In practice, however, consumption hasn’t vanished. It’s migrated beyond the reach of regulation, inspection, and public health policy. Social media has become a shadow storefront; the gray market thrives; nicotine flows without invoices, documentation, or compositional oversight. The border between the prohibited and the available is crossed daily by teenagers, adults, and informal vendors alike.
It’s the classic prohibition paradox: the substance is not eradicated; it is rendered invisible to the tools of the state. By criminalizing the formal channel, consumption is pushed underground, where no one checks IDs, no one answers for side effects, and no one plans for harm reduction.
Mexico
The Ban That Forgot the Smoker
In Mexico, Congress has approved a constitutional reform banning the production, distribution, and commercialization of e-cigarettes in all forms, though not their consumption. The move was quickly followed by a draft law aiming to legally define the banned devices and further restrict their commercial promotion.
Meanwhile, traditional cigarettes, the leading cause of preventable death, remain legal, widely available, and culturally normalized.
The contrast reveals a structural contradiction echoed globally: the deadliest form of nicotine consumption is legally protected, while less harmful alternatives with potential for risk reduction are pushed into illegality.
By elevating the ban to a constitutional principle without ensuring safe access to regulated alternatives or implementing public harm reduction policies, the Mexican state doesn’t just criminalize part of the supply chain; it abdicates regulatory responsibility. Control is ceded to the informal market: untraceable products, no quality checks, no labeling, no age restrictions.
The law enshrines the veto but discards the care. And by engraving prohibition into the Constitution, it converts a public health issue into a matter of policing, leaving the smoker stranded between the legality of what kills most and the illegality of what, properly regulated, might save their life.
Uzbekistan
The Crime of Choosing Less Harm
In Uzbekistan, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has signed a law that fully bans the circulation of e-cigarettes and similar nicotine delivery systems, including their production, import, export, purchase, storage, and transport.
Set to take effect in March 2026, the law begins with administrative sanctions: steep fines for those who manufacture, sell, or transport the banned devices. But it doesn’t stop there. The text also introduces criminal penalties, with prison sentences of up to five years for repeat offenses or activities deemed “large-scale”, opening the door to incarceration for non-violent infractions.
The only escape valve is voluntary self-reporting: a punitive mechanism masquerading as public health policy.
What’s criminalized is the alternative, not the problem. Traditional cigarettes remain legal, accessible, and socially tolerated. What vanishes is any legal space for products that, under proper regulation, could offer lower-risk options.
Rather than addressing nicotine dependence through information, regulation, and alternatives, Uzbekistan has chosen a legal architecture that pushes consumption into the shadows, where there are no health safeguards, no age checks, and no quality control.
It is an absolute ban, but highly selective. It doesn’t eliminate harm. It merely shifts it: to the wrong hands, the hidden networks, and the bodies the state prefers not to see.
Mongolia
Symmetry Without Science
In Mongolia, Parliament is debating a sweeping overhaul of the Tobacco Control Law with a clear objective: to place “new products,” that is, all alternatives to cigarettes, under the exact same regulatory regime as combustible tobacco.
The proposal includes progressively increasing excise taxes through 2030, a ban on flavors, strict display restrictions at points of sale, and tightened rules on smoke- and vapor-free environments.
The logic behind the reform rests on a structural misconception: the assumption that all nicotine-containing products pose equivalent risks. This conflation disregards decades of scientific evidence showing that the dangers of combustion far exceed those of non-combustible nicotine delivery. Treating everything under a uniform regulatory umbrella, without gradation or nuance, is, in practice, a denial of the very foundation of sound public health policy: risk proportionality.
What Mongolia is rehearsing is not merely restriction, but punitive homogenization.
Rather than discouraging smoking by promoting less lethal alternatives, the state is pushing a model that disincentivizes all forms of use indiscriminately, even when the risks are profoundly unequal.
It’s the triumph of regulatory symmetry over health rationality. A policy that, by making everything equal to the cigarette, doesn’t protect more; it merely simplifies the complex to make it administratively manageable.
South Korea
When Nicotine Becomes Tobacco
In South Korea, Parliament has taken a decisive step toward reshaping the legal framework governing nicotine products. A bill passed by the Legislation and Judiciary Committee proposes expanding the legal definition of “tobacco” to include synthetic nicotine. In effect, this move would subject vapes and similar products to the same tax, commercial, and regulatory regime as conventional cigarettes.
The official rationale is pragmatic: to “close regulatory loopholes” and increase tax revenue. But the real-world impact points elsewhere. Once again, the opportunity to calibrate regulation based on actual risk is discarded in favor of a conceptual equivalence that defies scientific logic.
The Korean logic is flawed from the outset.
Sharing an active ingredient doesn’t make two products equal in effect. Arguing that vapes and cigarettes deserve identical legal treatment just because they contain nicotine is like claiming hard seltzers, absinthe, vodka, and industrial kefir should all be regulated the same, disregarding concentration, context, usage patterns, and public health consequences.
By redefining “tobacco” to mean anything containing nicotine, natural or synthetic, South Korea institutionalizes confusion between substance and delivery. The risk lies not in the molecule, but in the route, the dose, the frequency, the device.
By erasing these distinctions, public health policy ceases to protect and begins to punish. No gradation. No focus. Just the comfort of a false symmetry.
Argentina
A Gesture Toward the Real
Across Latin America, the political compass points overwhelmingly toward prohibition. Almost everywhere.
But in Argentina, a surprising deviation: opposition lawmaker Ricardo López Murphy has introduced a bill that takes the opposite route, seeking to regulate the use of electronic cigarettes and nicotine pouches. The text acknowledges not only the existence of these products, despite a ban in place since 2011, but a more fundamental truth: banning is not the same as protecting.
The proposal sets clear limits on concentration (35 mg/ml for vapes and 20 mg per nicotine pouch), restricts flavors deemed “appealing to minors,” mandates health warnings covering 30% of packaging, bans sales to those under 18, and sets advertising rules: allowed only when targeting adults and outside mass media channels.
But the core of the bill isn’t technical, it’s political. In a country where the market already exists, albeit in the shadows, the proposal starts from a pragmatic recognition: the real choice isn’t between permission and prohibition, but between regulation and surrendering the market to others, smugglers, organized crime, paid influencers.
Alongside Portugal’s move to pull nicotine pouches out of fiscal limbo, Argentina’s initiative poses a question many governments still avoid: Is it possible to protect minors without abandoning adult smokers to fate?
The answer, still rare in the region, is beginning to take legislative form. But it demands a prior step: admitting that the real has already happened, and that ignoring it will not make it go away.
A Cartography of Erasure
Put them on the same canvas: the bread and sparkling water in Brussels, the generational smoking ban in the UK, Portugal’s tax on nicotine pouches, France’s Article 23, Ireland’s veto on disposables, the Czech decree on flavors, Mexico’s and Uzbekistan’s outright bans, South Korea’s legal redefinition, Mongolia’s regulatory flattening, and Argentina’s lonely gesture toward sanity.
What emerges isn’t chaos, it’s a pattern. Uncomfortable. Increasingly hard to ignore.
Childhood has become the universal shield. Widely accepted. Rarely questioned. Nearly every measure invokes, as a moral and political justification, the protection of youth. The motive is legitimate. But once elevated to dogma, it shuts the door on any serious debate about how to reduce harm among people who already smoke—millions of them, alive and forgotten.
Regulation is mistaken for expulsion. Restricting the advertising, circulation, and access to lower-risk products doesn’t eliminate consumption—it merely displaces it. To the underground. To encrypted messaging apps. To a gray market where there is no labeling, no age checks, and no minimum quality standards.
The risk gradient is erased. When the law treats cigarettes and vapes as equivalents, it sends a false message: that all nicotine products cause equal harm. Yet the scientific literature is unequivocal: the risk from combustion is exponentially higher. Nicotine without fire is a different story. Denying that isn’t prudent. It’s abandonment.
The easy gesture is favored over the hard system. Politically, it’s more convenient to announce a “smoke-free generation” than to construct nuanced public policies, ones that inform with precision, regulate with rigor, and offer viable alternatives. Eradication rhetoric demands less effort than the architecture of care.
Meanwhile, international documents, like the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, reinforce this prohibitionist reflex. On paper, they appear to be technical guidance. In practice, they reinforce the era’s central regulatory paradox: it’s easier to access what causes harm than what could reduce it. The lethal product remains legal. The alternative is criminalized.
Seen this way, the lunch in Brussels wasn’t just a diplomatic ritual. It was a crossroads.
Ministers can leave in silence or echo the slogans they’ve memorized, preserving a public health policy that keeps cigarettes intact while banishing their alternatives to illegality. Or they can admit that protecting children doesn’t require condemning adults who smoke. That legislating against reality isn’t health policy: it’s superstition. It doesn’t save: it deceives. And no generation will ever be “free” if freedom means only prohibition, with childhood as shield and adulthood as burden.
