Travel advice for vapers

The Telegraph has written a guide for vapers travelling to parts of the world that are even more hostile to e-cigarettes. I am quoted in it.

 

Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and editor of the Nanny State Index, which ranks countries by how much they interfere with people’s lifestyle choices, said: “The World Health Organisation’s campaign against vaping has been influential, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

“Bans on vaping and e-cigarette flavours, as well as e-cigarette taxes, have been steadily growing for years and it is important for travellers to be aware of what the rules are.”

Snowdon explained that this is particularly true of countries where the government owns or holds a stake in tobacco companies. Along Asia’s backpacking routes, Thailand and Vietnam have state-owned monopolies of the tobacco industries and heavily enforce anti-vaping laws, particularly in tourist areas. Visitors to Thailand face up to 10 years’ imprisonment for possession of vapes.

Prison sentences will soon also be on the cards for vapers in Hong Kong. The region already prohibits the import and sale of e-cigarettes, but a further ban on carrying vapes is due to be introduced on April 30.

 

It ends by saying...

 

“Vapers also need to be aware that they could be heavily fined for bringing an e-cigarette into Australia,” said Snowdon. The country banned vapes for recreational use, and devices containing liquid nicotine can now only be purchased from a pharmacy, with a prescription.

There are exceptions to this tide of vaping regulation, though. Highly conservative Saudi Arabia – despite forbidding alcohol – has surprisingly lax laws on it. Meanwhile, Norway plans to legalise e-cigarettes this coming July. But with the vaping crackdown picking up speed and legislation in regular flux, Snowdon warns that travellers should always check what the latest rules are before booking a trip.

“Caution is advised,” he said. “If all else fails, vapers can always go back to smoking for the duration of their holiday...”

The Nanny State Index doubles as a handy travel guide. You can consult it here.

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Could this anti-smoking sockpuppet be a victim of its own success?

According to the Charity Commission, the prohibitionist astro-turf group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) relieved taxpayers of £245,000 in 2024/25. Donations from the general public brought in a miserable £4,607. 

This racket has been going on for more than fifty years now and is surely due to come to an end. ASH's grifters are currently trying to gold-plate the Tobacco and Vapes Bill with ludicrous ideas such as individual warnings on cigarettes and banning filters, but since prohibition now has cross-party support, it is hard to see what purpose ASH serves. 

ASH themselves seem to recognise this. In their 'Statement of Risk', they openly ponder why the government needs to keep funding an extremist pressure group to lobby itself when anti-smoking extremism is now the norm amongst the political class. 

In the short term, they have got into bed with NHS England to work on "prevention and health inequalities". That, presumably, is where their £245,000 came from. In the long term, who knows? Most likely, they will pivot to becoming an anti-vaping group, but perhaps they will turn their attention to ultra-processed food, betting or red meat.

My article featuring ASH and other government sock puppets is still outside the paywall for now: Bootlegging Baptists: the logic of paternalistic collective action.  

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Spurious correlation news

The "gateway" theory of vaping is based on the observation that teenagers who have ever vaped are more likely to smoke than teenagers who have never vaped. I have often pointed out that teenagers who have ever vaped are more likely to have done lots of things that never-vaping teenagers have done, because they are different people. That doesn't mean that one behaviour causes another.

In 2018, for example, I wrote...

 

Since marijuana has never killed anyone, supporters of the war on drugs resort to claims about it being a gateway to heroin. E-cigarettes have never killed anyone either and so anti-nicotine extremists resort to claims about vaping leading to smoking.

In both cases, correlations can be found, but it is fairly obvious that they are not causal. Teenagers who vape are more likely to smoke, but they are also more likely to ride motorcycles, watch X-rated movies and have unsafe sex. They are also more likely to smoke cannabis, for that matter, but that doesn’t mean that vaping leads to any of these behaviours, nor would they be less likely to engage in them if vaping didn’t exist.

 

In an IEA report the previous year, I had written... 

 

Indeed, one of the studies in the Soneji review found that e-cigarette users were not only more likely to smoke cigarettes but were more likely to smoke marijuana (Unger et al. 2016). It would not be surprising to find that they are also more likely to drink alcohol and have unprotected sex, but it would be a stretch to claim that these risky activities are somehow caused by their earlier experiments with vaping.

 

And only last month I made the same point in relation to zero-alcohol beer...

 

Teenagers who like the idea of drinking non-alcoholic beer are presumably more likely to be interested in drinking real beer in the same way that risk-taking teenagers who are drawn to vaping, motorcycling and unprotected sex are more likely to be interested in smoking and illegal drugs. This is known as a ‘common liability’ and it could produce a statistical correlation between non-alcoholic beer consumption and actual beer consumption, but it would not be serious evidence of cause and effect, i.e. a ‘gateway’.

 

The example of vaping as a gateway to unprotected sex is a good way of illustrating spurious correlations. There is no plausible mechanism for vaping - or any form of nicotine use - to cause people to have unsafe sex. 

 

So it was with grim amusement that I saw that some clown in (where else?) Australia takes these correlations seriously.

 

Emergency medicine expert Professor Brian Burns said the anti-vaping program was vital to help curb vaping among youth given it was a gateway to cigarette smoking and high-risk behaviours. 

“Studies have shown that engaging in unsafe sex, other substance abuse, drink driving, texting while driving and driving without a seatbelt are associated with increased e-cigarette use among youth,” he said.

“Sensation seeking – the desire to experience novel sensations and the willingness to take risks is also associated with e-cigarette use. These activities can result in severe physical injury and harm.”

 

This chump also claims that vaping causes "asthma attacks", "inflamed or collapsed lungs", "severe respiratory illness", "seizures" and "cardiovascular system shutdown". Australia really is a basket case.

 

The article is headlined 'World-first anti-vaping program rolled out to tackle teen nicotine addiction crisis'. Perhaps they should try banning e-cigarettes, lol.

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Impact Assessment for vape ban doesn't assess the impact

I've been reading about the Impact Assessment for the proposed vaping ban. It is very poor and quite weird. It doesn't seem to know what the ban is supposed to achieve and certainly doesn't seem confident that it will achieve anything. I've written about it for The Critic...

 

Vapers going back to smoking is by far the most likely consequence of the vaping ban, especially since it will be accompanied by a tax on e-cigarettes that will double the cost of vaping, and the possibility of a ban on various flavours. And for what? DHSC admit in the Impact Assessment that “we cannot conclusively say whether these policy options will impact smoking, heated tobacco product, or vaping prevalence or consumption, and therefore whether there will be an improvement on health.” It puts the cost of the various new restrictions at £531.8 million, mostly from businesses having to put up new signs and train employees, while the benefits are priced at £0 because DHSC have no idea what the consequences will be. I never thought I’d say this about a government department, but you have to admire their honesty.

 

Do go read it all.

 

I could have written much more about this, and probably will, but here's an example of the barrel scraping that went on. Unable to find an example of non-trivial harm from vaping, the authors turn to an unpublished document from Canada...

 

In the Government of Canada regulatory impact analysis statement for the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act it was assumed that the mortality and morbidity risks associated with vaping are 20% of the mortality and morbidity impacts of cigarettes. This assumption was developed with members of an expert panel composed of five academics in tobacco control.

 

Who cares? Canadian health experts reckon it's dangerous to have more than two alcoholic drinks a week. No one knows what this piece of paper written in 2017 said and it doesn't matter. I've never even heard anyone clam that vaping is only 80% safer than smoking before. We have our own estimate from UK experts and they all say vaping is more than 95% safer. And they published their work so everyone can read it. 

 

Taking the evidence that each person who does not take up smoking gains 1.0 QALY, we could therefore estimate the number of lifeyears gained for each young person that does not take up vaping to be 0.2, or £14,000 in monetary terms. Additionally, taking the evidence that each person who quits smoking is equivalent to 0.74 QALYs, we could therefore estimate the number of life years gained for each person that quits vaping to be 0.148, or £10,000 in monetary terms.

 

You could but it would be mental. 

 

Fortunately, DHSC resisted the urge to quantify the "benefits" of people quitting smoking in this way, or at all. But nor did they quantify the costs of people quitting vaping to start smoking. Despite working on this since October, the Impact Assessment is a shambles.

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The rise and fall of British gambling

Most people know that the number of drinkers and smokers is in decline in the UK, but you might be surprised to hear that the same is true of gamblers. For the first time since the early 1990s, gamblers are in the minority with only 48% of English adults engaging in any gambling activity in the past year.

This is largely because the National Lottery has become less popular. Only 31% of adults in England bought a lottery ticket in 2024, down from 65% in 1999. But fewer people are participating in non-lottery gambling too. As the graph below shows, participation in non-lottery gambling has been in decline for well over a decade. These games are now played by a smaller proportion of the population than in the early 1990s.

 

Read the rest at IEA Insider. 

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Save vaping

I wrote about how the government is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with its Tobacco and Vapes Bill last week.

 

The most notorious — and risible — part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is the generational ban on tobacco sales which will effectively raise the smoking age by a year every year. This will do nothing for people who have been smoking for decades and whose health is most at risk. But the Bill also gives unlimited “Henry VIII powers” to the Health Secretary to regulate e-cigarette flavours, packaging and advertising, as well as controlling where people can legally vape. The government has said that it plans to use these powers as soon as it gets them and since the Health Secretary is Wes “tonne of bricks” Streeting, it is unlikely to use them wisely.

This is where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill stops being merely stupid and illiberal and becomes counter-productive even on its own terms. There is strong evidence from other countries that bans on vape flavours, e-cigarette advertising and other anti-vaping policies lead to increased cigarette sales and higher smoking rates. Since cigarettes and e-cigarettes are direct substitutes for one another, this is hardly surprising. Vape taxes undoubtedly have the effect of boosting the smoking rate and yet a punitive tax on e-cigarettes will be introduced in October. All this is happening at a time when the black market in tobacco is exploding and the de facto price of a pack of cigarettes is five pounds. 

 

No sooner had this gone online at The Critic than the government had announced that it intends to ban vaping everywhere that smoking is banned. The insane whirlwind of prohibitionism never lets up. 

 

You'll be hearing much more from me about this in the coming weeks, but I've already said a few words on my Substack.

 

I am genuinely puzzled why the government is picking a fight over this, especially when their main political threat is Reform. Do they even know themselves? The way it has been announced makes it seem like they’re almost embarrassed about it. Are they hoping to do it without anyone noticing (it will not require primary legislation once the Tobacco and Vapes Bill becomes law). There are more than five million vapers in the UK and I hope they/we put up one hell of a fight. 

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Scottish client journalism

Via Taking Liberties, I see that Scotland's Sunday Post has been publishing some anti-smoking slop ahead of the country's 20th anniversary of its smoking ban. 

 

Last week a reporter from the Sunday Post contacted Forest to say she was working on a feature ‘marking the anniversary of Scotland’s smoke-free legislation and its long-term public health impact’.

‘As part of the piece,’ she wrote, ‘I’m reporting on expert claims that improved respiratory health following the smoking ban may have helped reduce the severity of respiratory outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘I’d welcome a response from Forest to include balance in the article.’

 

This was a new one to me so I looked up the article. It is unbelievably thin. The "expert claims" amount to this and nothing more...

 

Doc­tor Rachel O’Don­nell, Asso­ciate Pro­fessor at the Uni­versity of Stirl­ing’s Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health (ISMH), said that Covid out­comes could have been worse without the smoking ban legis­la­tion.

She said: “It’s not an unreas­on­able leap to sug­gest that as a nation we might well have seen a dif­fer­ent scen­ario in terms of the res­pir­at­ory impacts of the Covid-19 pan­demic without the smoke-free legis­la­tion. I think we could have seen a dif­fer­ent pic­ture.”

 

It's not an unreasonable leap to suggest that The Sunday Post will publish any old bollocks and present it as news. This hunch from an activist-academic at the Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health - a slush fund/lobby group founded by the lunatic Gerard Hastings - was reported under the headline: 'Stub­bing out the cigar­ettes helped hos­pit­als cope with pan­demic'!

 

Forest sent them a few quotes, as requested, and pointed out the now-established fact that smokers were less likely than nonsmokers to get Covid during the pandemic. They didn't print any of it.

 

 

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