By Robert Egbe
In 2009, Brazil banned electronic smoking devices (including e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, and other emerging nicotine delivery systems. However, a loophole in the law left open a pathway for Big Tobacco and their allies to seek approval if they could demonstrate that their products were safe.
Nearly two decades later, none has succeeded.
Brazil’s health regulator, ANVISA, required tobacco and nicotine companies to provide scientific evidence supporting claims that these products were “reduced risk”, and “harm reduction” substitutes for smoking, or treating tobacco addiction. The industry failed to meet to those criteria. Instead, evidence showed that these products carry significant public health risks, particularly for young people.
As the world marks World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) on May 31, the tobacco industry is once again attempting to rebrand itself through a parallel campaign it calls “World Vape Day.” Unlike World No Tobacco Day, which was established by the World Health Organization (WHO) to highlight the devastating health, social, economic and environmental consequences of tobacco use, World Vape Day enjoys no recognition from the WHO, the United Nations, or any credible international public health body.
It is, at its core, a deadly marketing scam.
The campaign seeks to portray vaping products as modern, safer, innovative alternatives to cigarettes while downplaying the risks associated with nicotine addiction. This framing has gained traction in some countries, with troubling consequences. Over 100 million people worldwide now use vaping products, including an estimated 15 million children and adolescents. WHO data show that children are now, on average, nine times more likely than adults to vape. At least 15 million teenagers aged between 13 and 15 already vape, based on surveys from 123 countries, raising concerns about a new generation becoming addicted to nicotine.
Nigeria is not immune.
A February report by Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) found that Big Tobacco and its allies have exploited loopholes in Nigeria’s tobacco control laws to flood the country’s retail and digital spaces with no fewer than 573 new and emerging nicotine products. Many are packaged, flavoured and marketed in ways that appeal to young consumers. The findings align with broader evidence of youth targeting by the tobacco and nicotine industries.
In 2024, an investigation found that vendors in parts of Abuja were selling cigarettes, vapes and related products to schoolchildren, including those wearing their uniforms, despite laws prohibiting sales to minors.
In Nigeria, as elsewhere, the consequences are serious. Over 25,000 children between 10 and 14 years are daily tobacco users, while nearly 30,000 Nigerians die of tobacco related illnesses annually, a fraction of the over 7 million global smoking deaths.
One of Big Tobacco’s most prominent public relations hoaxes is the misleading “Quit Like Sweden” campaign, which falsely attributes Sweden’s declining smoking rates to widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches.
But Sweden’s CancerFoden (the Swedish Cancer Society) firmly repudiates this claim, affirming that there is no evidence that snus is responsible for the decline in smoking. Rather, Sweden’s success is attributable to decades of comprehensive tobacco-control measures, including increases of tobacco taxes, age limit on tobacco and nicotine use, ban on tobacco advertising, oversight mechanisms, limiting availability, reducing social acceptance through smoke-free schools, restaurants, bus stops and other outdoor spaces, and cost-free smoking cessation services. Similarly, the Swedish Public Health Agency states that daily cigarette smoking has declined in Sweden since the 1980s. This decline coincides with the extensive tobacco prevention work carried out during the same period.
What the industry conceals is that e-cigarettes and other so-called smoke-free nicotine devices are gateway drugs to smoking, and lung cancer risk. Many young people who begin with vaping products later transition to cigarettes, worsening their nicotine dependence.
This explains why dozens of countries have moved to restrict or prohibit vaping products. Today, at least 47 countries ban their sale entirely. Public health authorities and public health advocates continue to warn that nicotine is highly addictive and particularly harmful to children, adolescents and young adults whose brains are still developing.
The WHO has repeatedly warned that tobacco and nicotine companies are deliberately designing products to make them more appealing, easier to use, and harder to quit, especially for young people.
Governments are also increasingly noting the danger. Across the world, national and subnational authorities have filed lawsuits against tobacco companies to recover healthcare costs associated with smoking-related illnesses.
In Nigeria, the Federal Government and the states of Kano, Oyo, Lagos, Ogun and Gombe are pursuing claims reportedly worth more than ₦10 trillion against British American Tobacco, alleging negligence, fraud and other misconduct related to the manufacture and marketing of tobacco products.
This year’s World No Tobacco Day coincides with the Make Big Tobacco Pay Alliance’s Global Week of Action Against Tobacco, a coordinated international campaign demanding accountability for the health, economic and environmental harms caused by the tobacco industry.
The theme of WNTD 2026, ‘Unmasking the Appeal: Countering Nicotine and Tobacco Addiction’, could not be timelier. Behind the sleek packaging, fruit flavours, social media campaigns and celebrity endorsements lies the same objective that has driven the tobacco industry for decades: recruiting new users for its products of death and disease, and sustaining addiction. The public must not be deceived. World Vape Day is not a public health initiative. It is a marketing scam that deserves continued unmasking and rejection.
Egbe, a public health advocate at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), writes from Lagos.
