The Prohibitionist Delusion – Vaping Is for Enjoying Nicotine, Not Just Quitting

Like other uninformed commenters before her, a New Zealand academic has made the common (and tedious) mistake of thinking she knows what vaping is about by saying, “I know there is a big black market for vaping in Australia, but at least they’re sending the right message: that vaping should be for smoking cessation and not for recreational use.”

This is a perfect example of the blinkered worldview of a prohibitionist. It is completely disconnected from the truth, both historically and socially. Vaping was never invented solely to get people off cigarettes. It was created to let people continue enjoying nicotine in a way that posed far fewer risks to their health.

Hon Lik, the Chinese inventor who developed the modern e-cigarette in 2003, has been very clear about his intentions. He said it was designed to let “users enjoy nicotine alongside potential lower risks than cigarettes.” In his own words, the invention was not designed to help users quit nicotine or endure a joyless process of weaning themselves off a substance that they enjoyed. But to enjoy nicotine.

Yet prohibitionists pretend not to hear it. For them, everything must be about abstinence. Their imagination doesn’t extend beyond seeing something they dislike and pompously demanding that others refrain from doing it.

The truth is different. Vaping was a consumer-led revolution. It wasn’t governments, academics, or anti-smoking charities who brought it into existence. It was smokers who adopted the devices as a way to continue enjoying nicotine, only without the tar, carbon monoxide, and dangerous by-products of combustible cigarettes. To rewrite that history as if vapes are just clinical quit-smoking patches with a circuit board is arrogant at best and dishonest at worst.

In the real world, decent people live by John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. Writing in the 19th century, he eloquently made the point that, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

Modern society has largely accepted this as the limit of government power. You can restrict what people do if it directly harms others, but you have no business whatsoever telling people how to live their lives for their “own good.” Anything more than that is nothing but creeping authoritarianism.

Scientific evidence repeatedly concludes that there are negligible health risks from second-hand vapour. So, it is absolutely none of a prohibitionist’s business whether a legal-age adult consumes nicotine recreationally or not. To interfere is not public health. It is not science. It is nothing more than pure snobbery.

If anything, the prohibitionist worldview is not just misguided, it’s dangerous. In Singapore, citizens can now be prosecuted, fined, and even jailed for using nicotine in a safer form, while cigarettes (the deadliest form of nicotine delivery) remain perfectly legal. This is the prohibitionist’s logic in action. In this system, the only “harm” is the harm caused by the policy itself. Perhaps prohibitionists should be banned instead. They seem far more dangerous to the public.

Sadly, the direction that prohibitionists are pushing is towards an Orwellian world where adults are infantilised, told that enjoying nicotine is somehow immoral, and are stripped of safer options under the illusion of “public health.”

To be clear, vaping was never meant solely as a smoking cessation device. To claim otherwise is a deliberate misunderstanding, not an innocent mistake. It carries the sinister implication that adults cannot be trusted to make their own choices, that pleasure is a sin, and that governments should decide not only what keeps you alive, but what makes your life worth living.

Vaping is about enjoyment. It always has been. And if prohibitionists can’t accept that, perhaps it’s their worldview that needs banning, not nicotine.

Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.