In the early 2010s, there was an explosion of seductive technologies that sustain the addiction of nicotine. Called variously such as e-cigarettes, vapes, heated tobacco products, and heat-not-burn devices, among several others. Promoted by both tobacco and non-tobacco companies, these attractive products aimed to expand and deepen nicotine addiction.
Last week, Britain reversed its position on vaping. Once the world’s most vocal champion of vapes as a harm-reduction tool, the United Kingdom now bans the sale of tobacco products and vapes to anyone born after January 1, 2009. This generational prohibition marks a shift in global public health policy. It undermines the argument that vapes are safer than smoking. For India, which banned vapes in 2019 but continues to struggle with weak enforcement, the British reversal delivers both validation and a sharp warning.
In August 2015, Public Health England (PHE) gave vaping a clean chit, claiming that these new technologies were significantly ‘less harmful’ than conventional cigarettes. The tobacco and vape industry positioned vaping as a tool to help smokers quit. PHE’s endorsement fuelled a global boom in the vape industry and created enormous pressure on governments across South Asia to permit or regulate these products. India remained circumspect and resisted. As the world’s largest tobacco consumer, with a large legal tobacco economy and an even larger illegal one, India’s stakes were enormous. India’s public health advocates presented two arguments in favour of a ban. First, the country already struggled to regulate a bewildering variety of smoked and smokeless products; adding vapes would further overwhelm an already overstretched regulator. Second, no clinical trial had conclusively proven their safety.
Researchers found sharp divisions within India over whether to ban or regulate vapes. Advocates argued that vaping offered adult smokers a less harmful path to quitting. Critics warned of a gateway effect that could draw young people into nicotine addiction. By default, India chose caution. In September 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the ban. India became one of the first countries in the world to prohibit the production, manufacture, import, export, transport, sale, distribution, storage, and advertisement of all vapes products. The law imposed strict penalties for violations.
Science has since vindicated that decision. Recent global studies confirm that vaping is not safe. Researchers have identified toxic agents in vape aerosols that cause measurable harm. Studies link the use of vape and the like products to serious lung damage, with adolescents facing the greatest risk because their respiratory systems are still developing. Investigators conclude that vaping actively undermines existing tobacco-control efforts rather than supporting them. The idea that vapes function purely as harm-reduction tools has collapsed under the weight of evidence. Britain’s shift on tobacco and vaping for younger generations reflects this emerging consensus and signals the end of the industry’s most powerful narrative. Like tobacco, vapes too have a massive environmental footprint, a fact the tobacco industry likes to sideline.
India moved first, but it has not moved far enough since. Despite the 2019 ban, vapes continue to circulate freely in grey markets. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in 2025 found a pooled vaping prevalence of 14 per cent among study populations in India after the ban, far higher than pre-ban levels. Researchers identify inconsistent enforcement as the primary reason. The ban exists in law but not in practice. It does not reach markets, alleys, or the backstreets of colleges and schools, nor the social media feeds where young buyers find sellers.
Young people face the greatest danger. Studies document rising vape use among middle- and high-school students across India. The tobacco industry has long targeted youth through flavoured products, aspirational marketing, and calculated normalisation in popular culture. ‘Flavoured’ vapes now occupy visible space in the Indian market. Researchers warn that industry-driven debates about harm reduction distract from the urgent need to keep these products out of young hands. The window to act is narrowing.
India’s tobacco-control framework (the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, the National Tobacco Control Programme) and its commitments under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, gives the government the tools it needs. Public health leaders have embraced the idea of phasing out tobacco entirely, and the 2019 vaping ban fits that vision. But the vision lacks a clear roadmap and, without one, remains a declaration rather than a programme.
Several departments, such as food and drugs, customs and excise, lack a clear mandate to prohibit the vape trade within the ambit of the 2019 law. The enforcement failure is not just administrative; but there is also a culture in which there is a tendency to violate norms and push boundaries. Indian cricketers, actors, and models vape openly. Films, television shows, and social media content normalise the habit and direct young audiences to sources where they can buy products that the law forbids. India’s law compounds the problem by permitting personal importation and possession of vapes. This contradiction undermines the ban from within. Celebrities endorse, and content creators glamorise, vaping. Such actions must face legal accountability. The entertainment industry often ignores existing guidelines that prohibit the depiction of tobacco-related products on screen, and regulators allow it. A hidden trade combined with open public defiance constitutes a crisis that demands a coordinated national response.
India must close legal loopholes. It must hold platforms and celebrities accountable for promoting banned products. It must equip enforcement agencies to dismantle the grey market that sustains vaping despite the ban.
Another conflict is emerging. India is witnessing a rapidly growing synthetic and natural nicotine industry, with manufacturers seeking to profit from the booming global market. Some of those proposing to extract “natural” nicotine from tobacco leaves are based in politically sensitive tobacco-growing regions such as Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. This raises a fundamental question: does India want to contribute to producing nicotine for vapes while banning them domestically? This is morally untenable. There are already products that can be manufactured but not sold or consumed in India, such as gutka, certain pesticides and chemicals, and asbestos. Another persistent concern is that some doctors and medical practitioners in their ignorance support vaping, often at the behest of industry-backed lobby groups.
Britain’s reversal should prompt all nations to revisit their positions. This process must begin with the WHO, which has so far remained ambiguous and has not called for an outright ban on vapes. India banned vaping before much of the world understood the need to do so. More important, it lacks the will to enforce what it has already enacted. The world is catching up to India’s 2019 vaping ban decision. India cannot gloat on its prescience. Instead, India must now catch up to enforce its own law.
India’s policymakers must rethink on how it wants to relook at tobacco as a whole. Tobacco use is the single largest cause of avoidable death among adults in India. Its use gives India the dubious honour of having the world’s largest tuberculosis, lung and oral cancer, and several other diseases. Britain colonised India and hooked it on cigarettes. One ‘imperial tobacco’ company stayed behind to make sure the habit never died. Although the cigarette industry is regulated, the bidi and smokeless tobacco sector operates with almost no oversight. Irrespective of regulation, all forms of tobacco undermine India’s public health goals. Now with Britain dismantling its tobacco addiction at home, it is time India looked inwards.
Pranay Lal is a natural history writer who is currently working on a book on how nature shaped the subcontinent’s history