PAPAIOANNOY: Safer nicotine products are not going away — Canada needs to face reality

Maria Papaioannoy is a Canadian advocate and former smoker who has spent years advocating for practical approaches to reducing smoking-related harm. She regularly engages with policymakers and public health discussions surrounding safer nicotine alternatives in Canada. As the founder of R4V Canada, the largest consumer movement for safer nicotine products, Maria holds a unique and personal perspective in this space. May 31 is World No Tobacco Day, a date tied to a decades-long global ambition championed by the World Health Organization: reducing smoking rates to under five percent by 2035, often referred to in tobacco control circles as the “5 by ’35” goal. That deadline is approaching fast, and Canada is nowhere near where it should be.According to Health Canada’s own 2024 data, roughly 13% of Canadians still smoke. That number should be significantly lower by now. Countries like Sweden are proving what is possible when governments embrace harm reduction instead of fighting it. Sweden is on track to become one of the first countries officially considered “smoke-free,” largely because smokers moved to safer nicotine alternatives like snus and nicotine pouches.Canada could have followed a similar path with vaping products and nicotine pouches. Instead, policymakers caved to pressure from tobacco control zealots more interested in policing nicotine than eliminating smoking. They chose fear, stigma, restrictions, and excessive taxation over pragmatic harm reduction.Canada is at a crossroads when it comes to nicotine policy. Regulators can either accept reality and create smart, modern frameworks around safer nicotine products like vaping devices and nicotine pouches, or they can continue pretending prohibition works while fueling one of the largest black markets this country has ever seen..Because here’s the truth: no one in public health seems willing to admit that safer nicotine products are not going away. And no amount of moral panic, fear campaigns, or performative press conferences is going to change that.What Canada has now is not the result of the products themselves failing. It is the result of poor regulation.We created a system that taxes reduced-risk products aggressively while cigarettes remain widely available almost everywhere. We created restrictions so excessive that legal businesses struggle to compete, while underground sellers thrive online, through social media, WhatsApp groups, and informal networks. We allowed policy to become driven by ideology instead of harm reduction.And when governments overtax, overrestrict, and stigmatize products people clearly want, consumers don’t disappear. They simply move elsewhere.That “elsewhere” is the black market..We watched it happen. Just days after a Ministerial Order directed by former Minister of Health and tobacco control employee Mark Holland, which removed all nicotine pouches from convenience stores and put them behind a pharmacist’s counter, a black market emerged. If you find a berry-flavoured nicotine pouch in your kid’s backpack, it is an illegal product.Black markets do not check IDs.Black markets do not follow manufacturing standards.Black markets do not test products for contaminants.Black markets do not care about consumer safety..Ironically, the harder governments crack down on regulated, safer nicotine products in order to protect the children, the more they hand control over to the exact people least interested in protecting youth or consumers.If policymakers genuinely care about safety, the answer is not prohibition disguised as regulation. The answer is a properly regulated legal market.This approach involves lowering excessive taxes on reduced-risk products to prevent adults from resorting to underground markets, establishing clear manufacturing and safety standards, and consistently enforcing age restrictions. It also emphasizes supporting law-abiding retailers rather than penalizing them, acknowledging the significant role flavours play in aiding adults to transition away from cigarettes, and communicating honestly about the relative risks of different nicotine products instead of assuming they all pose equal dangers.A modern nicotine policy should focus on reducing disease and death, not policing morality or chasing headlines. The real question is whether Canada wants those products inside a regulated system focused on safety and accountability, or controlled by the underground economy we are actively helping create. If we do that, we will hit our goal of "5 by ’35.”Maria Papaioannoy is a Canadian advocate and former smoker who has spent years advocating for practical approaches to reducing smoking-related harm. She regularly engages with policymakers and public health discussions surrounding safer nicotine alternatives in Canada. As the founder of R4V Canada, the largest consumer movement for safer nicotine products, Maria holds a unique and personal perspective in this space.

PAPAIOANNOY: Safer nicotine products are not going away — Canada needs to face reality

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