Malaysia’s Vape Ban: A Gift to Criminals, a Blow to Public Health

When governments talk about banning vapes, they often promise to “protect public health” and “crack down on illegal products.”

But the reality is very different: prohibition doesn’t make demand disappear – it just hands the market over to criminals and pushes smokers back toward deadly cigarettes.

Malaysia’s proposed vape ban: the wrong approach to a real problem

The Malaysian Ministry of Health is planning a full-scale ban on vaping products, starting with open‑pod systems and potentially extending to the entire legal market.

The move is being justified by concerns that some people use pod‑based devices to consume illegal substances, and it has been described as non-negotiable by the Health Minister.

Misuse of vapes with illicit drugs is a serious issue. But instead of targeting the black market supplying those substances, the government is going after the only part of the ecosystem it can actually control: legal nicotine vapes sold openly to adults.

It is like responding to unsafe street alcohol by banning licensed shops while leaving bootleggers untouched. With smoking rates in Malaysia still high, cutting off access to safer nicotine alternatives is not a public‑health strategy – it is a gift to the black market.

What Happens When You Ban Legal Vapes

Experiences from other countries show what follows harsh vape bans. Demand for nicotine and vaping does not suddenly vanish; adults continue to seek out these products.

Once legal options disappear, consumers turn to unregulated sellers and smuggled devices. Dangerous liquids and poorly made hardware begin to circulate with no quality control, while law enforcement struggles to keep up and organised crime fills the gap left by closed vape shops.

The harsher the bans, the stronger the black market becomes. Where legal vapes have been heavily restricted or made prescription‑only, illegal disposables, bootleg liquids and home‑mixed products quickly flood in.

Criminal networks thrive on this vacuum, tax revenue disappears and health authorities lose any real insight into what people are using. Malaysia is on the brink of repeating this mistake. A ban would not eliminate vaping; it would make it more chaotic, more dangerous and far harder to control.

If adult vapers lose access to regulated products from licensed retailers, many will either return to smoking or buy whatever is available from illegal sellers, who have no age checks, no standards and no incentive to follow any rules.

A policy claimed to be about “protecting people from illegal substances” ends up dismantling supervised, legal channels and driving users straight into the shadows.

Moreover, banning open‑system vapes will not stop the illegal sale of pre‑filled, closed devices that already contain banned substances, nor will it prevent people from consuming those substances in other ways.

The only real change is that responsible adult vapers lose regulated products and clear points of sale, while those dealing in illicit cartridges and other drugs simply adapt and continue operating in the dark.

Thailand and Singapore: Regional Proof That Bans Backfire

Malaysia need not speculate about what prohibition brings – its neighbours have already run the experiment. Thailand banned vapes in 2014, yet the black market in 2019 estimated at 3 to 6 billion baht – and continues to thrive despite repeated crackdowns. Disposable vapes remain available on street corners across Bangkok despite repeated crackdowns. As Asa Saligupta of ENDS Cigarette Smoking Thailand notes since e-cigarettes are illegal, they are sold on the black market without any quality control which creates a risk of tampering, contamination, or counterfeit products.

Singapore's trajectory is even more cautionary. Despite banning vapes in 2018, authorities seized S$41 million worth of e-vaporisers between January 2024 and March 2025, a dramatic increase from just S$95,460 in 2019. Prohibition also created perverse incentives like drug-laced "K-pods" containing the anaesthetic etomidate flooded the unregulated market, with one-third of seized vapes testing positive by mid-2025. An editorial in the independent magazine Jom argued the ban created incentives for black marketers to create the most high-value, addictive products. Malaysia's Act 852 already provides a regulatory framework for legal vape sales and abandoning it for prohibition would repeat the failures playing out next door.

Harm Reduction, Not Prohibition

Malaysia has a better option: a harm-reduction approach that treats adult vapers as part of the solution, not the problem.

Rather than moving toward prohibition, authorities should fully implement and enforce the existing regulatory framework under the Control of Smoking Products for Public Health Act 2024 (Act 852), while continuing to strengthen safeguards around the manufacture, sale and marketing of vape products.

Under this framework, vape retailers can be licensed and subject to regular inspections, with strict enforcement of age-of-sale rules and penalties for non-compliance.

Product standards and regulatory oversight would ensure that consumers know exactly what they are inhaling, while enforcement efforts prioritise illegal THC or drug-containing cartridges and illicit e-liquids rather than diverting resources toward compliant nicotine products that many smokers use to move away from combustible cigarettes.

If Malaysian policymakers truly want to reduce harm they should choose regulation over prohibition. That means strengthening enforcement of existing laws, including Act 852, separating nicotine regulation from drug enforcement, focusing police resources on genuinely illegal substances such as illicit THC products, and communicating honestly about relative risks so smokers understand why switching to vaping is far less harmful than continuing to smoke.

Over time, Malaysia could also consider embedding tobacco harm reduction within its broader national health strategy, recognising the role that lower-risk alternatives can play in helping smokers transition away from combustible tobacco.

Malaysian vapers did not create the black market, but they will pay the price if the government bans the legal alternatives they rely on. Their experiences, their quit stories and their needs must be part of the conversation.

The World Vapers’ Alliance will continue to stand with Malaysian consumers and push back against policies that confuse prohibition with protection. - DagangNews.com

Alberto Gómez Hernández is Policy Manager at the World Vapers' Alliance