Ban flavored vapes and expect an increase in cigarette sales: It’s a familiar concept to experts who recognize the two as economic substitutes. Amid battles over access in the United States, tobacco harm reduction advocates can point to various research to make the case that far from being a trivial inconvenience, vape flavor bans seriously impede efforts to reduce smoking-related deaths.
Advocates in Canada—who successfully fought to push back a prospective federal flavor ban in 2025—have a compelling new resource of their own, after the November publication of a study concerning Canadian jurisdictions that have imposed bans.
“This is the first study outside the US to prove that banning vape flavors causes a direct, casual increase in cigarette sales,” Michael Pesko, one of its authors, told Filter.
A health economist and professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Pesko said the study is critical because it shows that even in countries with very strict tobacco laws, flavor bans backfire.
Canada enforces a raft of tobacco control measures including a plain-packaging mandate and prohibiting most forms of tobacco advertising and promotion. But these efforts to make smoking less attractive failed to prevent a surge in cigarette sales once vaping was made less attractive.
“By banning vape flavors, we saw cigarette sales jump by nearly 10 percent.”
The researchers analyzed 2018-2023 sales data, mostly from gas stations and convenience stores. They used a stacked DID model (difference-in-differences) to compare outcomes in provinces with vape-flavor restrictions versus those without.
Provinces and territories that have imposed near-total flavor bans in the name of preventing youth use include New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island and Quebec.
“Our data shows vapes and cigarettes are two sides of the same coin: When one becomes harder to get, people flip to the other,” Pesko said.”By banning vape flavors, we saw cigarette sales jump by nearly 10 percent.”
These findings are to be expected, said David Sweanor, an industry expert who chairs the advisory board of the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa.
Evidence of a substitution effect has long been established, he noted—even though it’s significant to demonstrate, as the researchers put it, that “patterns of substitution between e-cigarettes and cigarettes are generalizable across countries with different tobacco regulatory strengths.”
“This should be no more surprising than the substitution effects seen with caffeine, fruit or any other consumer products,” Sweanor told Filter. The difference is that this particular substitution can be a life-or-death matter. “The evidence is clear: Keeping cigarettes a better consumer option than massively less toxic products kills people.”
“Supposed health authorities are destroying that trust and putting our overall public health establishment into the hands of populists, conspiracy theorists and grifters.”
The 9.6-percent increase in cigarette sales under vape flavor bans that the researchers estimated is likely to represent many people who had been able to quit a deadly habit, but were then pushed back to it by provincial policies.
Maria Pappioannoy of Rights4Vapers, a consumer advocacy group in Canada, blames a group of tobacco control campaigners for using their longstanding relationships with provincial governments to lobby for flavor bans.
“We are deeply disappointed that these self-proclaimed leaders remain anchored to outdated thinking and chose fear over facts to get their bans,” she told Filter. “Their campaigns have not protected Canadians; it has failed them, and helped tobacco companies increase their revenues.”
Sweanor said he finds it “disturbing” that public health advocates have pursued policies so detrimental to the very thing they should stand for. “What is even more disturbing is how predictable it is that they will continue supporting and pursuing such policies and refuse to engage in any open discussion about what they are doing and how they can justify it.”
When decision-makers are persuaded by these arguments, it increases both stigma against people who use nicotine and distrust in public health, he added.
“Governments need to stop regulating in a vacuum and realize that ‘public health wins’ on vaping can be ‘public health disasters’ for smoking.”
“Supposed health authorities are destroying that trust and putting our overall public health establishment into the hands of populists, conspiracy theorists and grifters.”
Getting policymakers to embrace the evidence that is so routinely ignored seems like a herculean task, but Rights4Vapers, Pappioannoy said, “will continue to do what we have always done”—educate, advocate and “push for a modern, science-based framework that protects access to safer nicotine alternatives.”
Pesko would agree with that. Even though his latest study adds to a growing body of evidence pointing in the same direction, he’s seeing yet more jurisdictions considering flavor bans.
“Governments need to stop regulating in a vacuum and realize that ‘public health wins’ on vaping can be ‘public health disasters’ for smoking,” he said. They should not, he emphasized, be “accidentally incentivizing cigarettes by stripping away features like flavors that make less-harmful alternatives attractive.”
Photograph by Lindsay Fox via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, received an unrestricted grant from the the Sweanor Family Fund at the Ottawa Community Foundation in 2025. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.
