Recent fabricated trends in Pakistan argue that vaping in Pakistan is a natural, grassroots movement that helps people quit smoking. It says policymakers should support this trend instead of banning it. This sounds reasonable at first. But a closer look shows the argument is built on weak evidence, and it ends up defending the vaping industry more than it defends public health.
The main point is that we should trust what smokers are already doing more than what health experts advise. But this is not how public health works, and it should not be. Smoking was once seen as a “personal choice” too. So was not wearing a seatbelt. When addiction and misleading information are involved, a person’s choice is not always a safe guide. This is exactly why health experts and government bodies, not shopkeepers or biased surveys, must decide what is safe. This matters even more for teenagers. Most teens do not start vaping after carefully studying health risks. They start because of social media influencers, peer pressure, and flavours designed to attract young people. If we make policy based on “what people are already doing,” we are letting trends decide our health rules, including trends created by companies that profit from selling vapes.
Vape-favoured studies are being conducted only inside vape shops. This is a major problem. People who are already inside a vape shop, buying vapes, are likely to say good things about vaping. This kind of survey misses many important groups, i.e., people who tried vaping and went back to smoking cigarettes, people who now use both cigarettes and vapes together, which is very common and worse for health, not better, and non-smokers, especially teenagers, who never smoked before but started using nicotine through vaping. A question arises here that self-reported answers, taken in a shop, with no medical check-up and no follow-up are really reliable in health matters? Such tactics are very different from real clinical studies, and comparing them to organized quit-smoking programs is misleading.
These studies serve as promotional material in which they talk about “experts,” but do not mention what the WHO actually says. The WHO has clearly stated that e-cigarettes are harmful and that we still do not know their long-term effects. The WHO does not recommend vaping as a way to quit smoking when safer, approved treatments already exist. Because of this, 40 countries, including Australia, India, Singapore, and Thailand, have banned or heavily restricted vape sales.
Another important point is that even when people are asked if vaping is completely safe, most said no. But when the question was changed to ask if vaping is less harmful than smoking, more people said yes. These studies treat this as smart thinking by the public. In reality, this is a trick of wording, not real evidence. This is the same method used by companies to make a harmful product sound acceptable, not because it is truly safe, but because something else is worse. This comparison ignores the fact that vaping has its own serious health risks, including lung injuries and possible heart and breathing problems, that have nothing to do with cigarettes.
These studies barely discuss the fastest-growing group of vapers, which is teenagers and young people who never smoked before. These are not smokers trying to quit. They are a brand-new group becoming addicted to nicotine because of flavours and social media marketing. By only talking about adult smokers who reduced cigarette use, such studies avoid the real danger of creating a whole new generation of addicted young people.
Pakistan loses more than 163,500 lives to tobacco every year. A complete ban on vaping can only bridge this catastrophe. If regulation is considered as an alternative at any point, it must be conditioned with WHO recommendations, and nothing less. Until there is strong, independent, long-term proof that vaping truly helps public health, proof that even the WHO says does not yet exist, we should not open the door to a new product whose real dangers we are still discovering.
Ashfaq Ahmad
Communication Officer
The writer works at Society for Alternative Media and Research. The organisation has been working on tobacco control for the last twenty years and can be contacted at the following email.
ashfaq@alternativemedia.org.pk
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