Mexico is set to make a vape ban part of its constitution by the end of 2024. “It is essential that this reform is passed,” said President Claudia Sheinbaum in October, just weeks after she took office. “The approval process is underway.”
Victory for her left-leaning Morena party in the June election included a supermajority in the lower house of Congress, giving her government substantial leeway to do as it chooses.
Mexican policy has been increasingly hostile to vapes for some years. Sales, marketing, production, transportation and importation of vapes have all been banned. However, some vape shops continue to operate legally, having obtained court rulings in their favor. There’s additionally a large gray market, with little enforcement. But a constitutional amendment would end the ambiguity.
“What we are facing now is the very likely possibility that the ban will be enacted in the Mexican constitution,” Tomás O’Gorman, a Mexican lawyer and co-founder of the advocacy group Pro-Vapeo Mexico, told Filter.
The government’s reasons for wanting to cement a ban are familiar worldwide, including youth use and claimed health concerns around vapes. But of the estimated 1.7 million Mexicans who vape, many are using the devices to replace cigarettes.
Around 12 million people in Mexico smoke, and the country suffers close to 50,000 smoking-related deaths each year.
“By limiting access to harm reduction devices through prohibition, many people will return to the combustion cigarettes.”
Smoking rates are lower than previously, and vapes have certainly played a role. The government has done little to help, O’Gorman said, after years of spreading misinformation about safer nicotine products. He believes a constitutional ban on vapes will see smoking increase.
Miguel Garcia, a tobacco harm reduction advocate in Mexico City, agrees. “This will keep smoking rates remaining high in Mexican society,” he told Filter. “By limiting access to harm reduction devices through prohibition … many people will return to the combustion cigarettes, and it’s only logical that this will increase health problems for the population.”
Around the world, exaggerated or fabricated health concerns are often enough to get vapes banned, despite the fact that combustible tobacco—which unequivocally causes 8 million annual deaths—is sold legally.
The prohibitions are particularly harmful in the Global South, as O’Gorman noted. “Bans deprive smokers of safer alternatives,” he said, “and sooner or later, they suffer the consequences of smoking in countries where medical services are poor, so the suffering and impoverishment of smokers is magnified.”
Besides direct public health impacts, there are widespread fears that an entirely illicit vape market will drive violence in Mexico—where violence over control of the banned drugs market, including a militarized drug war fought by successive governments, has long been at devastating levels.
During her election campaign, President Sheinbaum said she would focus more on addressing demand for drugs than on supply-side crackdowns. But that hasn’t dissuaded her from fostering another large illicit market.
“It does not take much imagination to foresee the violence that could be unleashed in Mexico.”
O’Gorman fears that heavier enforcement against vapes will have a range of negative outcomes. “The ‘soft’ black market that resulted from a weakly enforced ban was not dangerous,” he said. “But the black market that arises from a ban in which there is greater persecution of the shops by the government will certainly produce grave results.”
The illicit vape market will now “grow and strengthen,” Garcia said, further empowering established trafficking groups which already control most unregulated sales. This will go “hand in hand with many social problems,” he added, including “physical violence.”
“Illegality is promoted, violence is encouraged, the state loses resources and collects fewer taxes,” O’Gorman summarized, noting that violence over Mexico’s vape market has already begun.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, vape policy has caused similar problems in a very different country.
Australia, where making vapes prescription-only reduced legal access to the point where they were effectively banned, has experienced firebombings and murders, as different groups fight turf wars over the resulting unregulated trade.
In Mexico, O’Gorman predicted, it will be much worse.
“If the de facto prohibition that exists in Australia has resulted in so much violence,” he said, “even though that country is, in my opinion, one in which there is a lot of security and compliance with their laws, it does not take much imagination to foresee the violence that could be unleashed in Mexico if organized crime ends up co-opting this market.”
It’s another way in which vape bans hit lower-income countries harder, he continued. “Due to precarious conditions and limited resources, bans in poor countries magnify the negative consequences and dangers” associated with illicit markets.
Besides the specific risks of the constitutional ban, there are broader principles at stake, argues O’Gorman, who teaches corporation and succession law at the Universidad Panamericana, in Mexico City.
“Personal autonomy and human rights are seriously violated, such as the right to health, the right to information and freedom of choice,” he said.
Garcia calls instead for investment in education and information programs, to help Mexicans “develop awareness” in making informed decisions about nicotine products for themselves.
This path would center people’s agency rather than “depriving [them of] freedoms,” he said, and involve regulation, not prohibition.
“Create a regulation that makes it easier for Mexicans to acquire harm reduction devices which allow them to continue consuming nicotine, but not have to smoke cigarettes to get it, and help them improve their health.”
Photograph by Vaping360 via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0