In countries where nicotine vapes are generally available to adults, with corresponding reductions in smoking, youth vaping has again and again been used to attack and roll back vape access.
The extent of youth vaping has often been exaggerated, and it has never been tenable to argue it’s a problem comparable to millions of smoking-related deaths. Such arguments are nonetheless politically potent.
That’s why it’s so significant that youth vaping in New Zealand, one of the world’s outstanding tobacco harm reduction success stories, has reportedly halved in recent years. It refutes any narrative that broad vape access to help adults switch from cigarettes inevitably means mass youth use.
The Year 10 Snapshot Survey from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH NZ), released in late 2025, involved over 30,000 participants aged 14 and 15. It revealed that “regular” vaping—defined as vaping at least once a month, so not necessarily at a level that might risk dependency—had dropped from 20.2 percent in 2021 to 11.2 percent today.
Daily vaping, meanwhile, fell from 10.1 percent in 2022 to 7.1 percent. And the proportion of teens who have never smoked continues to rise, hitting a record 89.4 percent.
“Policies to regulate vaping only came into place in 2021,” Youdan noted. The survey, he said, shows how impactful those regulations have been.
These findings provide valuable insight on how countries can successfully implement tobacco harm reduction. According to ASH Director Ben Youdan, it all comes down to responsible regulation.
Youdan told Filter it’s important to note that in the early, unregulated days of vaping in New Zealand, the country saw “rapid” uptake of vaping in both adults and youth.
“Policies to regulate vaping only came into place in 2021,” he noted. The survey, he said, shows how impactful those regulations have been.
New Zealand’s balance has involved measures designed to make it harder for youth to vape without unduly obstructing harm reduction. “Harsh penalties for retailers that sell to minors, limiting flavor names [but not the actual range of available flavors] to reduce marketing appeal to kids, and restricting most sales to R18 stores seem to have got the vaping market more under control,” Youdan said.
New Zealand “understood that regulation was the key and developed a pragmatic plan to do that, which included consumers,” Nancy Loucas, executive coordinator of the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA) and a New Zealand resident, told Filter.
Plummeting youth-vaping rates should help protect adult vape access from political opposition going forward. When the country is one of a handful closing in on “smoke-free” status (a smoking rate of under 5 percent), it’s vital to keep that momentum going. Back in 2011/12, New Zealand’s daily smoking rate was 16.4 percent; in 2024/5, it was 6.8 percent.
“Despite claims that vaping leads to youth smoking, we have seen no evidence of this,” Youdan commented. “In fact, the biggest gains in reducing smoking since 2021 have been the younger age groups.”
Part of this could be down to youth witnessing less smoking among their parents and other adults, he said, and a pertinent counterfactual question is “whether more young people would still smoke, had vaping not contributed to reducing adult tobacco use in NZ.”
“NZ shows it can be done. That pinpricks the campaign of fear-mongering and moral outrage that is being propagated by the quit-or-die crowd.”
New Zealand’s combined record of reducing smoking and reducing youth vaping makes it hard to process how the country was smeared with a “Dirty Ashtray” award, for “being used by tobacco industry interests,” during the World Health Organization’s COP11 tobacco control meeting in November.
Loucas sees the country’s success—and the threat that poses to WHO narratives—as the very reason for the insulting award. While the WHO backs bans and heavy restrictions on all consumer nicotine products, New Zealand has generally been focused on what works.
“NZ shows it can be done, near perfectly and successfully,” she said. “That pinpricks the campaign of fear-mongering and moral outrage that is being propagated by the quit-or-die crowd.”
New Zealanders need only look across the Tasman Sea for an example of how different things might have been.
Australia has perhaps the harshest vape restrictions among high-income countries. In 2021, its government made vapes prescription-only—which amounted to virtual prohibition, when many adults had no practical legal access. In 2024, the government stopped requiring prescriptions. But vapes are still only legally available from pharmacies—in a very limited permitted range, at high prices and requiring a pharmacist’s consultation.
Smoking cessation in New Zealand has dramatically outpaced that in Australia.
“[Our] regulated industry model has also almost entirely avoided the illicit market that plagues our neighbors in Australia and has greatly expanded the harms of smoking and vaping to include significant social costs,” Youdan said, referencing problems such as violence over control of Australia’s unregulated vape market.
Dr. Colin Mendelsohn, who has written for Filter and was the founding chairman of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association charity, told Filter “there is no justification” for Australia not to adopt the New Zealand model, when doing so “would have a huge beneficial effect on public health.”
“Our study in Addiction found that smoking rates have been declining twice as fast in NZ as in Australia,” he said, and the only relevant difference between the countries was higher vaping uptake in New Zealand.
Despite the headline news from the ASH survey, it also revealed that both vaping and smoking remain significantly higher for some groups of young people, and among Māori youth in particular.
Despite the headline news from the ASH survey, it also revealed that both vaping and smoking remain significantly higher for some groups of young people. Among indigenous Māori youth, in particular, daily vaping stands at 16.5 percent (down from 20.9 percent in 2024), and “regular” smoking at 5.2 percent (no significant change since 2024).
Dr. Marewa Glover, a behavioral scientist and tobacco harm reduction advocate who is herself Māori, blames this stalled rate of smoking on disinformation about vaping and nicotine from the New Zealand Labour Party, which lost power in the 2023 election.
“NZ’s incredible success at reducing overall smoking, especially amongst minors, has been spun into a negative by unethical politicians whose sole focus appears to be to discredit the incumbents,” she told Filter.
“The target for their misleading messages are primarily Island peoples—groups with disproportionately lower levels of education and higher rates of smoking,” she continued. “The people most at risk of dying from a smoke-related disease are being sacrificed for the political gain of a few. This is why Māori minors are likely lagging.”
Photograph by TBEC via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0
Both the Centre of Research Excellence: Indigenous Sovereignty & Smoking, which was founded by Dr. Glover, and The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, formerly received grants from Global Action to End Smoking. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.
