Vaping is Illegal in India. So Why is it Everywhere?

Dear Reader,

Mustafa is 17 and works for his father’s marketing and interior design business in Delhi. He also cannot stop vaping.

He first tried it three years ago when an older friend urged him to take a puff. It felt relaxing, and soon, one puff became several. Within months, he was finishing a vape cartridge a month.

“My dad caught me once. He found one in my jacket pocket and told me to quit,” Mustafa told me. He tried, but the craving was too strong. His father eventually confiscated three vapes and threw them away. Mustafa has now "quit" vaping by switching to cigarettes instead.

His story captures the core issue with vaping in India. Vaping is a public-health paradox: it could hook teenagers on nicotine, or help smokers quit it.

When the government banned e-cigarettes in 2019, making it illegal to manufacture, sell, import or advertise them, officials argued that vaping could act as a gateway to smoking and other harmful substances.

But many harm reduction experts say vaping is also one of the most effective ways to quit smoking. They argue that India has a massive tobacco problem. Tobacco Atlas puts adult smoking prevalence in India at about 7.1%, or roughly 7.4 crore people, as of 2022. Tobacco causes more than 13 lakh deaths in India every year.

Harm reduction advocate Dr. Kiran Melkote disagreed with the ban, calling it completely “unscientific.” Moreover, he says the ban didn’t eliminate vaping. Rather, it just pushed the market underground.

It’s true. At several paan and smoke shops that I visited, consumers could buy Chinese-made disposable vapes for around Rs 2,000. These are the vapes that teens like Mustafa are buying too.

The vaping contradiction doesn’t have clear answers. Vaping can be both an exit from nicotine dependence and an entry point into it. And, banned or not, it’s flourishing in the shadows.

To hear more on this from consumers and doctors, check out the latest episode of The Signal Brief. You can find us on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

I’d love to hear what you thought! Write to us at [email protected], or reach me directly on Instagram or Twitter at @thesignaldotco, or via email at [email protected].

Thanks for listening, and have a rejuvenating weekend.

Best,
Kudrat
on behalf of The Core

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