It was perhaps inevitable that once smoking was “handled,” tobacco control would turn its fire on nicotine. From the UK’s disposable vape ban to EU pouch restrictions and the WHO’s war on nicotine, prohibition is on the march. Shot on location at GFN 2025 in Warsaw, Christopher Snowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, delivers a stark assessment: public health is recycling old fears, ignoring evidence, and steering policy into prohibitionist chaos. With governments fueling black markets and pushing vapers back to smoking, Snowdon warns the war on nicotine has only just begun.
Featuring:
CHRISTOPHER SNOWDON
Head of Lifestyle Econ., Inst. of Economic Affairs
Author, columnist, public health critic
iea.org.uk
nannystateindex.org
Transcription:
00:09 - 00:46
[Brent Stafford]
Hi, I'm Brent Stafford and this is RegWatch by regulatorwatch.com. We're here in Warsaw, Poland for the Global Forum on Nicotine, the 12th edition of the annual conference on safer nicotine products and tobacco harm reduction. In this episode, we're going to be speaking with one of UK's sharpest and most outspoken critics of public health paternalism, Christopher Snowden, Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. You are a writer par excellence. Why don't you share a little bit about what you write and why you write for our audience?
00:46 - 01:09
[Christopher Snowden]
Well, I'm at the Institute of Economic Affairs, free market think tank in London, and I mainly write about what we call lifestyle economics, nanny state issues, smoking, drinking, gambling, vaping, food, soft drinks, anything that's in the crosshairs of the new prohibitionist killjoy public health movement. So all the things that are fun in life. Exactly. The vices.
01:10 - 01:12
[Brent Stafford]
How long have you been writing about vaping?
01:13 - 01:55
[Christopher Snowden]
Since the outset, really. I mean, since 2009, first time I ever took a vape. I was writing about tobacco before that. In fact, I'd just written a book about the history of tobacco control or the history of anti-smoking activity when I first encountered vapes, which were really crude cigarettes in 2009. It was just too late to mention them in the book. So the book's purely about anti-smoking. If I ever revise it, it's going to have to have a few chapters about vaping and what happened next. But yeah, I've been writing about vaping since the beginning pretty much. It was that Velvet Glove Iron Fist? Yes. Which is also the name of my blog, yeah.
01:55 - 01:59
[Brent Stafford]
Oh, that's fantastic. So do you get depressed having to write about this stuff?
01:59 - 03:59
[Christopher Snowden]
Yes. Yeah, especially vaping, actually. More than anything else I write about. Because it almost seems pointless to try and challenge this stuff. I mean, I was at the first GFN 12 years ago, and there were a few conferences like this, not as good as this one, not as big as this one, but yeah, there were things going on, the ESIG summits and things like this, and it was really interesting because you had a lot of consumers there. It was very new. You could talk about product innovation, and the products were innovating at a very fast rate. And the emerging science was coming out showing there isn't a gateway effect. They're very effective for smoking cessation. And here's what the future probably looks like. And initially, you had these objections. But what about gateway effect? What about the kids? What about if these hidden harms only emerge in the medium to long term? And those questions have really all been answered now. And they were answered quite a long time ago. And it just gets a bit samey, really, trying to deal with the same nonsense again and again, the same kind of zombie arguments. Nothing's changed other than you've got people now who have been using e-cigarettes, like me, for well over a decade. The guy who invented them has been using them for 22 years or something. He's still standing, you know? So when people say we don't know the long-term effects, I mean, we know enough. Just from, you know, if we did some proper observational epidemiology, people use them for 10, 15 years. You know enough to see all sorts of markers, you know? So we... I kind of made my mind up about the science of vaping a good 10 years ago, and nothing has changed other than it's got stronger in a positive kind of harm reduction direction. But as you know, mainstream public opinion has gone completely in the opposite direction. And there's a relative handful of people making the case for tobacco harm reduction, and they're just drowned out by Bloomberg's billions.
03:59 - 04:04
[Brent Stafford]
As the science gets stronger, it almost gets more hysterical the reaction.
04:05 - 05:01
[Christopher Snowden]
Well, we're just being stonewalled, really. You know, they just keep saying the same thing. The same kind of things like, you know, the gateway effect, tobacco, popcorn lung, and all this kind of stuff. We don't know the long-term consequences, blah, blah, blah. It's been the same script from day one. And 15 years ago, these were legitimate questions to have. You know, what you do in science is you have a look at the hypothesis, you test it, and see what the results are. And the results are... as good as they could be. And yet, public perception is so diametrically opposed to all the evidence that it's really depressing, to answer your question. It's depressing writing about this. There are other areas where you feel, okay, this is a new claim, let's have a look at this, or this is a silly new policy idea, let's have a look at that. But with e-cigarettes, we're just going round and round in circles, but losing. Going round and round in circles in a spiral of decline, really.
05:01 - 05:09
[Brent Stafford]
So speaking of losing your home area there, UK, would you say there's a big loss that's happened in the UK?
05:09 - 07:49
[Christopher Snowden]
Yeah, it's going downhill very quickly. We've just banned disposable vapes, but that's just going to be the start. We've got quite a big e-cigarette tax coming in next October, I think. And the government is currently passing legislation which basically just gives any future health secretary what we call Henry VIII powers. In other words, they can just do whatever they want with advertising, packaging, and flavors. So how did it go so terribly wrong in the UK? There was a big... There was a big kind of national panic, or I say big, it was big enough to occasionally hit the media, about underage vaping. Very much actually like the Juul panic in the US a few years ago. It was like that, but we don't really have, well, we don't have Juul in the way Americans do it, because we have a nicotine limit. So Juul never caught on. in the same way as it perhaps did in some American high schools. But we had disposable vapes. Disposable vapes came on the market, they grabbed a huge amount of market share really, really quickly. They were, a lot of them, quite colourfully designed. You could see why people might think, oh, these are going to appeal to kids. It's been illegal to sell a vape to a child since 2015. The vapes that are being sold are very often illegal, and indeed the people who are selling them quite often are illegally in the country. So you've got a lot of laws that could be enforced before you start banning entire product categories. But the way it is in Britain and a lot of other places is you've got governments that can't really govern, they can only legislate. And it makes them feel good to be passing laws, often literally just banning something again. You know, things that are already banned. We're going to really ban this this time. You know, I think we're bringing in some law specifically against assaulting shopkeepers quite soon. Assault is obviously already illegal, but this is the kind of government we've got. We have a pet abduction bill. was going through Parliament when the last election was called, which would ban trying to induce a cat down the road. Stealing pets is already illegal. We have the Theft Act, for example, of 1968. This is what we're doing in Britain. We just keep bringing in new legislation to try and cover up the fact that we're not enforcing the existing law. So anyway, kids were getting hold of disposable vapes. There's no two ways about it. And teachers and parents had justifiable concerns about it. And it could have been dealt with by actually enforcing the laws that already exist. Instead, we're banning disposable vapes. And I suspect because that's not going to work, there will be restrictions on flavors, packaging, advertising, and this vape tax coming in. That will only fuel the black market, which will probably lead to even more teenagers using vapes. And so it will go on in another spiral of decline.
07:49 - 07:57
[Brent Stafford]
So this went into effect June 1st, I believe, correct? Yeah. So can you walk into a store and still buy disposable?
07:57 - 08:13
[Christopher Snowden]
Yeah, absolutely. I haven't noticed any difference. Yeah, I mean, Britain is increasingly lawless. A lot of kind of, at least certainly low-level crime, like shoplifting, is very much tolerated now.
08:13 - 08:25
[Brent Stafford]
So doesn't this kind of harken back to prohibition in the U.S., alcohol prohibition, where one of the biggest disasters was that it created lawlessness? Yes.
08:25 - 10:04
[Christopher Snowden]
Yes, the lawlessness is more general than just being created by prohibition, but it's a perfect environment for illicit sales to take place. And a huge section of the tobacco market now is illegal. The government is burying its head in the sand about the scale of it, but we've seen a near halving in cigarette sales. in the space of three years. The smoking rate has gone down by like half a percentage point in that time. And that's got to have something to do with vaping, wouldn't you think? Well, no, because the smoking rate hasn't actually gone down that much in that particular period of time. I'm talking 2021 to 2024. We've had a huge decline in smoke in the previous 10, 12 years, which absolutely is mostly down to vaping. But as the hysteria about vaping has got a lot of people to go, better the devil you know, or go back to smoking, we've seen that start to flatten out. But at the same time as it's flattening out, you've seen this massive decline in legal cigarette sales, right? So it's, and we know that, smokers are not reducing the number of cigarettes they smoke. So there is only one possible explanation for this, and that is that you've got a big black market which has grown much, much bigger. So this is only going to continue. We've got very, very high taxes now on cigarettes, £15. We're bringing a tax on vapes in soon. We've already got, who knows, I think about a third of the disposable vape market was already illicit before they were banned. They're not going to go away. And I'm almost kind of resigned to the fact that this is now going to be a semi-illicit market and which will ultimately become fully illicit.
10:04 - 10:20
[Brent Stafford]
Now, speaking from across the pond for the last 10 years, we always point to the UK for their enlightened tobacco harm reduction position. But that seems to be now... Dismantled.
10:20 - 10:46
[Christopher Snowden]
Yeah, it's it's it's going it was always gonna go I mean it was always fairly obvious to anybody who understands the mentality these people that once they felt they dealt with smoking they were going to go after vaping and Anti-smoking campaigners in UK kind of do feel they've dealt with smoking because of the tobacco and vapes bill Which we haven't even mentioned this part of it yet, but we've got this insane generational ban right this sliding scale where if you're born after
10:46 - 10:47
[Brent Stafford]
2009?
10:48 - 11:11
[Christopher Snowden]
After 2008, so from January the 1st, 2009, you're never going to be allowed to legally buy tobacco. That will of course be sped up, but the fact is that they think now, because obviously if you ban people of a certain age from doing something, they'll never do it, you know, that that's going to be the end of smoking sooner or later, so now let's go after nicotine in general.
11:11 - 11:20
[Brent Stafford]
Now, does that bill actually prevent somebody who's born after from buying legally a vape, or is it just cigarettes?
11:20 - 11:42
[Christopher Snowden]
No. At the moment, it's not just cigarettes, but it doesn't include vaping. It includes snuff and pipes and all the things that kids love to consume. It even includes cigarette papers, believe it or not, and anything that can encase tobacco. So it's pretty wild. It does include heated tobacco at the moment, the legislation, but it doesn't include vapes yet.
11:43 - 12:17
[Brent Stafford]
If I recall back, to maybe 22, seeing this uptick start to happen from the anti-tobacco organizations in the UK complaining about the recycling issue. And I remember doing coverage three, four years ago mentioning, ooh, this could be the Achilles heel for vaping. And it really felt like they got a hold of something there. Was that recycling thing, the battery issue, was that a real Trojan horse?
12:17 - 13:43
[Christopher Snowden]
Well, yes. I mean, I think there were some people who had legitimate concerns about littering, actually, in particular. Disposable vapes, in fact, can be recycled, and the industry was starting to put recycling points in their shops, but they were a bit slow to do so. I mean, the reality is it would have been probably better if disposable vapes had never been invented. from my perspective. I do fully appreciate there's a lot of people who use them who wouldn't have started vaping anyway. They're really convenient, particularly for older people. I know people myself who had tried stuff like I've got and just couldn't be bothered with the fiddliness of it and working out how it works. And disposable vapes are dead simple. You go into a shop, just like you buy a pack of cigarettes every day, you buy a disposable vape every day and you chuck it away. but on balance you'd have to say that would be a better thing if disposable vapes never hit the market because we were doing fine until then and maybe there were always would have been a moral panic about underage vaping because of inevitably you're always going to get people who'd never smoked and people under the age of 18 who were vaping but it was really sped up by disposable vapes and it's difficult to see this ban on disposable vapes shutting these people up now because it isn't really about recycling it's certainly not about battery wastage and stuff, because the combined amount of lithium in these batteries is trivial compared to how much is being used to make millions and millions of electric cars, which ultimately will be thrown away as well.
13:44 - 13:56
[Brent Stafford]
Now, I'm not sure if this was from University College London. Correct me if I'm wrong. Some research suggests the disposable vape ban could drive up to 200,000 people back to smoking.
13:56 - 16:04
[Christopher Snowden]
I think that's perfectly likely, yeah. We'll have to see. It depends a little bit on how the industry responds. I mean, I think in practice, the big selling disposable vapes, they've kind of stuck a little charging portal in them and put the price at by a quid. If so, that's not going to make a big difference. It's quite possible that vapors will adapt. You can get basically the same devices that are rechargeable and refillable So we'll have to see, but I think it's absolute certainty a certain number of vapers will go back to smoking. They're already doing it just because they think they don't want to get popcorn lung, you know. So this is, and the vape tax even more so, right? It's obviously going to, you know, narrow the price differential between cigarettes and vapes. And given that so much of the cigarette market is illegal and that in practice the going rate for a pack of cigarettes now is £5, not £15, right? Then you're on the brink of making vaping more expensive than smoking and people genuinely feel they know where they are with smoking, you know and what about in France did I hear correctly that You if you're carrying and you know safer nicotine products it could get you into trouble in France the law that's being proposed I don't think it's been introduced yet the amount to ask somebody in France but theoretically at least, possession, not sale or manufacture, but possession of a nicotine pouch could land you in prison for five years. That apparently is what the law is threatening. This is really clown show stuff now. This is incredible because nicotine pouches are, let's face it, oh no, we don't know the long-term effects, but you don't need to have a 50-year observational epidemiological experiment to know that the cellulose and nicotine in a pouch is going to be like snus, but even safer. And yet you've got countries outright banning them. You've got the EU proposing quite a significant tax on them. And people who should be welcoming these products with open arms are trying to nip them in the bud.
16:04 - 16:14
[Brent Stafford]
So the people that are leading the fight, the hysteria, whatever term we want to use, what's motivating them?
16:15 - 17:58
[Christopher Snowden]
Well, if they don't keep campaigning, they haven't got a job, have they? I think it's really that simple now. I think it was saying, you know, every great cause starts out as a crusade turns into a business and degenerates into a racket. And that, insofar as this is a great cause, is absolutely true, certainly true of Action on Smoking Health in the UK. So, you know, this tobacco invokes bill, ultimately, okay, it's going to be many decades before it happens, but ultimately it's going to supposedly eradicate smoking. At which point you've got to go, okay, job well done, we're going to pack up our tent and go home. But they're not. I'd say they're going after the vapes. They'll go after anything. And they need to cause panic about things. Otherwise, they don't keep the money rolling in. And a lot of money comes from the government. You've obviously got Bloomberg money all over the place across the world. They've got to do their job to justify it. their grants and their salaries. Ash, their main thing for the last few years now has been a levy on the tobacco industry, which obviously would just be passed on to smokers. So there's no meaningful difference between an industry levy and excise tax. And excise taxes are already very high. And the Treasury have explained this to these people several times. But they keep pushing for it because what they want is they want a ring-fenced pot of money for them and their friends. So it's just turned into an outright grift now. It's not even like these are moral crusaders as such. It's just self-interest. They put the control in tobacco control. Yeah, well, it's always really been about control, isn't it, I think. And it's certainly not about tobacco now, because it's about pouches and vapes.
17:59 - 18:14
[Brent Stafford]
Right, so that's the question, is that it's morphed into a war on nicotine. Yeah, I mean, they would go to war on anything, I think, if it gave them a purpose. I just think it just shows that they're like frauds.
18:16 - 20:13
[Christopher Snowden]
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, you can see how it would snowball like that because nicotine obviously is the common denominator. But the whole problem with nicotine was supposed to be, the whole problem with nicotine addiction. Well, let's take a step back. Why should the government care if people are addicted to anything? per se, it's none of the government's business. Now, obviously, if you're addicted to something that's unhealthy, some people, not me, would argue that it is the government's business because we pay for the healthcare system and we've got a duty to protect people and blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's an argument. It's an argument based on health. It's not an argument based on addiction. Addiction is only significant insofar as it keeps people doing something which supposedly they don't really want to do and is really bad for them. If you take out the it's really bad for them part, what have you got left? You've just got people like me who just like enjoying nicotine, got a pouch in right now and would rather keep it that way. And I'm not going out beating anybody up or knocking people over the head or causing any kind of problem or even health problems to myself, certainly not of any meaningful magnitude. So how is it the government's business? Well, it's not, but you can see that when you start down this road, then it ends up in this fanatical place where you've got the WHO explicitly saying they want a nicotine-free world. What's it got to do with the WHO? And this is going to end in disaster, and it already is. And in a way, I'm kind of relishing the prospect of this all blowing up, because I would like to believe at some point the public will say, what why how how we ended up here these i had these people these people are responsible for this but if you look at australia which has literally blown up um i don't think there's that many australians have kind of twigged yet i think they've kind of normalized fire bombings and murders and this insane black market is if it's just a natural a natural occurrence rather than holding the people uh to account who really should be tarred and feathered over this
20:14 - 20:45
[Brent Stafford]
Is it deflection in some manner? And let me try to get a beat on this. They don't seem to say, let's have a war on heroin or let's have a war on fentanyl. Well, we have had the war on drugs. We've had the war on drugs and they seem to now that's over. Well, the drugs won. Yeah, the drugs won. Yeah. And so to my point being is that they've just nicotine is benign enough that they can push that kind of mentality at it and they're not really dealing with any of the real things.
20:45 - 21:36
[Christopher Snowden]
No. Are you familiar with the concept of narco-tyranny? I've heard that before, yeah. Narco-tyranny is a state in which rampant and flagrant serious crime is more or less ignored. Widespread petty crime is completely tolerated. And instead, the government focuses all its attention on trying to regulate every aspect of law abiding people's lives and going after them for trivial stuff that shouldn't be a crime and often even literally isn't a crime. We have non-crime hate incidents in Britain now. We have 30 people, is it a day or a week, I think a day, being arrested for things they say on social media. It's much easier to go after people who are basically decent and law-abiding, and that would include nicotine users.
21:37 - 22:29
[Brent Stafford]
in the US they expect in 2025 for safer nicotine products, so your vapor and your nicotine pouches, the actual sales by volume is going to overtake combustible cigarettes in the US in 2025. between 2024 to 2025, 2.5 million more Americans made the switch over. So it's now 20.5 million Americans that are actually using these products. So at the same time that tobacco control is going hysterical, You've got the FDA not approving anything but yet consumers are still voting with their feet and their wallets and their lungs and they're switching over to safer nicotine products. On one side it feels like there's a win happening and on the other side it feels like we're getting our butts kicked here. Yeah, that's true.
22:29 - 25:48
[Christopher Snowden]
I mean, yeah, let's look at the reality of it. And you look at Philip Morris' sales, I mean, it's an incredibly large chunk now, and non-combustible. And they said they were going to do it, and fair play, they've done it a lot quicker than I thought they would. So you're right, consumers do seem to be pretty impervious, a lot of them to all this misinformation and propaganda, which is great, but where could we be if it had not been for all this misinformation? We could be in a remarkably good place, I would think, globally. You know, the smoking rate in the EU has dropped like 2% in eight years or something. I mean, it's pathetic. And they're so proud of their tobacco products directive, which did absolutely nothing. They've got a growing black market now. It's, there's such an opportunity being missed. You know, I said last time I was at this conference, I could have this revelation really missed, and maybe not that profound. But had there never been an anti-smoking movement, fewer people would be smoking today, I think. Because the anti-vaping movement just came out of the anti-smoking movement. And the anti-vaping movement is what's holding us back. So if you can imagine there was never a tobacco control movement, everyone would know that smoking was bad for you. Governments would probably be taxing it anyway, because they just like taxing things. You don't need an anti-smoking movement to introduce certain bits of anti-smoking regulation. And what would have happened was 20 years ago, the e-cigarette would have come on the scene, and that would have been, we'd be able to advertise it all over the place and talk about it, and people would be taking it up, using it, you'd get scientists looking at it going, yeah, this is fantastic, this is kind of the thing we've been waiting for. It might even have been invented earlier. I mean, that's also a possibility without tobacco control. But it would have just taken off without anybody to stop it. Instead, we had an institutional tobacco control movement, particularly in places like Australia and America. They were incredibly resistant to it, had a huge amount of funding, and they have been the obstacle to progress. I can well imagine a parallel universe in which hardly anyone's smoking now because they're using a ray. of safer nicotine products. But instead, you've had to, as a consumer, very often literally break the law, as in Australia, and obviously quite a lot of people in America and elsewhere. In order to kind of, you know, get too emotional about it, but in order to save your own life, you kind of have to break the rules and break the law. And that is down to the anti-smoking lobby, which obviously, as we've already said, has mutated into this anti-nicotine lobby. Has the U.S. exported this? It's exported a lot of the misinformation. I mean, most of the junk science has come specifically from California. UK is still actually pretty good with the science, got to be said. We obviously got a few good scientists from the UK here at this conference. But, you know, your Stanton Glances and so on over in California, they have been pretty relentless in producing nonsensical science to try and scare people and doing tests on zebrafish and mice and so on. And it turns out if you... You know, if you dip a mouse into a tank of formaldehyde, they don't do so well. Apparently that has some implications for vaping, you know.
25:48 - 25:52
[Brent Stafford]
Well, so final question I hate to ask, but do you have any hope left?
25:54 - 26:55
[Christopher Snowden]
Well, in the long term, yeah, because I think that we're in for a period of very obvious black market and criminal activity. which could become normalised and tolerated as it is in Australia, in which case that would be very bad, but hopefully there are enough sensible people who remember the days when actually if you wanted to buy cigarettes you just went to a shop and bought them and you didn't really cause any problems to anybody else and there wasn't a terrorist funding criminal network involved. And hopefully people will just think, hang on, why are we doing this again? I thought this was about health, just trying to make society better. Not that many people are smoking anyway. They're nearly all adults, they can make their own minds up. Let's go back to a kind of sane world. But what I'm saying effectively is it has to get worse to get better. And it's always risky saying that because things can actually get worse and worse.