Editorial. 2025 will hopefully be the year when we start talking about vejpning and e-cigarettes in earnest. The market is growing. But at the same time, the illicit trade is exploding and with it, underage use.
The government wants to see harm minimisation in the nicotine market while protecting young people from nicotine use. It is possible to achieve both, but it will require radical change and new ways of thinking. And some brave political decisions.
For over five years, every other article in Vejpkollen has been about youth employment or the huge black market supplying our children with e-cigarettes. Or rather vejps, as disposable models are starting to be popularly known.
Has it not been about research on young people's use it has been about developments in different countries where criminals are taking advantage of a huge demand in order to make millions in profits selling uncontrolled products. Lately, our mainstream media has picked up on this. Often with a very dramatic tone, where children sell vejps to children and fight over territories, a perfect breeding ground for gang wars and recruitment to a much more dangerous drug trade.
But this has been a problem for a long time. It's just that no one has really bothered to take it seriously. Now it is growing "explosively". Why has it become so?
Dare to break with prevention
I dare say that one of the biggest driving forces behind this development stems from the one-eyed and ideologically coloured prevention policy. For almost 20 years, the Swedish Parliament has actively fuelled a policy whose main purpose is to prevent young people from even smelling an e-cigarette - or caring about nicotine at all. It is a policy that aims for a 'nicotine-free society”. Several million government tax dollars has therefore funded annual campaigns to influence legislation, i.e. to tighten and complicate the laws and frameworks affecting the already established and important sales of smokeless nicotine, e-cigs and snus, in Sweden.
Comprehensive and complicated regulatory framework
In its wake we have sky-high taxes on e-liquid (increased by a whopping 500 per cent in 2021), hugely harsh age verification requirements (in some municipalities it is impossible to buy online), strong restriction of marketing and the opportunities to sell the products we consumers actually demand. Add to that very ifextensive product registration and reporting requirements (all regulated products must be registered six months in advance and then annually by both the importer/retailer AND the foreign company exporting to Sweden) - a cumbersome law that, in the event of a small mistake, can render entire ranges illegal overnight.
A cloudy pool of paragraphs
The problem with this prevention-orientated legislation is that, by its very nature, it takes no account whatsoever of either consumers or the businesses involved. The dream of a 'nicotine-free society' is paramount. The companies selling e-cigarettes have had to kindly adapt, at least if they want to continue selling their products legally. The vast majority have done so. And now they are knee-deep in a sea of regulation that makes it virtually impossible to quickly adapt their product range to meet an even faster changing demand for new products. We, the consumers, are left in a kind of murky puddle of paragraphs in between, slightly confused, not knowing from month to month what products are available.
But that was precisely the aim of the prevention policy: to prevent, discourage and limit the use of nicotine, by preventing, discouraging and limiting the sale of nicotine products.
Made for the black market
The result is that unfortunately the availability of vejp products is now bigger than ever. But not through the legal channels and not through the specialised shops that sell registered products. Instead we have a black, and partly grey, market where established brands compete with illegal and much cheaper products.
For those who are reasonably familiar with how the e-cigarette market, and in particular the market for so-called disposable models, has operated over the last 10 years, this development does not come as a shock. Quite the contrary. As I said, it was very much expected.
How does the trade in e-cigarettes work?
Unlike cigarettes and other tobacco products, e-cigarettes are primarily an electronic product, not necessarily a nicotine product. It is an electronic device manufactured in a factory, on an assembly line, by technology companies. Like mobile phones, factories produce units that are sold to a global market. These shell devices are then filled with the desired content, in the case of e-cigarettes a liquid that may contain nicotine or any other substance, depending on where in the world it is intended to be sold. This is very much the case for the disposable models.
Millions of units a day
99% of the companies responsible for manufacturing have their headquarters and factories in the technology hub of Shenzhen, China. Customers range from tobacco companies to retailers and individuals. The products are continuously adapted to notso different legislations and customers can just as easily specify what they want for their particular market: for example, the EU and the US have completely different legal requirements regarding the authorised nicotine content and the size of the liquid container itself. Companies pump out millions of small disposable vejps on a daily basis. That is how great the demand is. This is where the legal, serious, trade in single-use models has its cradle. But also the black one.
Affected by prevention policies
As with other technological products, such as mobile phones, the conditions for the products change as the market sets new requirements. For mobile phones, this happens over a few years. For e-cigarettes, it happens from month to month. But unlike mobile phones, e-cigarettes are affected by a completely different type of change - prevention policy. When a particular variant is popular in one region, it often becomes banned or impossible to sell in another. But when a reputable retailer in one region is suddenly forced to withdraw its orders, another one is quickly in the lobby picking up the products instead. It could be an opportunistic distributor hoping for a quick buck, or a professional criminal who receives a scratch card of 20 000 units that suddenly could not be sold legally in a prohibitionist country. The manufacturer quickly finds a new paying customer and does not have to worry about this any more. In this way, the illegal trade becomes really lucrative for all parties involved, while the market is flooded with everything from legal to illegal products.
The weed trade is starting to resemble the cannabis market
We are now reading more and more reports in the Swedish media about how criminals, without any problems, are buying thousands of vejps via online shops and making millions in profits via local sales. They target anyone who wants to buy (individual shops or private individuals), but above all to those who cannot normally buy the products through legal channels - that is - young people. Moreover, they do so by exploiting equally underage sellers. For those who know how the cannabis trade works, the similarities are striking. It ends up with large flows of money and violence between very young people - the very group that prevention policies were supposed to protect.
More control became less control
As I said, no one should be surprised by this. After all, the goal of prevention policy has been achieved: legal trade would be strangled. Who cared about the warning cries of those who know this business?
Now the illicit trade is growing instead, on an ever-increasing scale, with the result that the products are more accessible than ever to minors. Sweden's, and for that matter the EU's and much of the Western world's, prevention hysteria has had the direct opposite effect to what was intended - use among young people is increasing, rather than decreasing. In practice, more control became less control.
Do we favour the tobacco industry?
Those of us who saw it coming can only stand by and watch it happen. We are left to clench our fists in our pockets as any criticism of prevention efforts is dismissed as "self-interest" or something that "favours" the tobacco or vejpindustry. It is, of course, pure rhetoric, used to advance one's own cause without having to bother with counter-arguments.
And it no longer holds.
Give the black market a fight
Prevention policy must be problematised, because it is not working as intended and it is our children who are paying the price. A new approach is needed here. It is only through a controlled and legal market that prevention has a real chance of working. And that's in everyone's interest, from business owners to consumers and those who want to see a reduction in nicotine use among young people. So instead of trying to limit supply, perhaps we should be working to increase supply, with better product safety and simpler rules to create stability in the market? Are there openings to create relief for businesses? Yes, perhaps that is what is needed if we are to give the black marketeers a fight, instead of an open goal.
Ideological bias that must be broken
Nothing is solved overnight. But becoming aware of the dynamics of the e-cigarette market is a good first step. Instead, we are now pouring millions (of our tax dollars) into organisations campaigning for tougher legislation. An example of this was when Non Smoking Generation and Tobaksfakta only a few years ago persuaded the Social Democratic government to try to ban flavours in e-cigarettes. Now it was voted the proposal down - which was a stroke of luck - in countries that have introduced such a ban, the black market has taken over to a greater extent than in Sweden.
Reality vs ideology
There is always an ideological bias in the debate on nicotine use. This must change and our politicians must finally sit down and talk to market participants. The flip side can only be broken by opening up the conversation about nicotine use and nicotine sales. Conversations with consumersyoung and old, should carry as much weight as expensive info sessions with activists from Non Smoking Generation. Insights from retailers and manufacturer should carry as much weight as fact sheets and reports from CAN. Market Analyst is likely to give better advice than doctors in Danderyd and nicotine researcher at the University of Gothenburg. Voices from police officers and customs officers should be prioritised over meetings with activists from the Karolinska Institute and the Heart and Lung Foundation.
New legislation is good
2025 will hopefully be a good year for harm reduction in Sweden. As e-cigarettes and snus take over the nicotine market, fewer children and adults are smoking. The government has introduced harm minimisation as a tobacco policy objective. We will hopefully have a new law against the sale of nicotine products to minors, and a tougher law making it more difficult to store and keep unregistered nicotine products. All this is good. But it is not enough. To achieve prevention worth mentioning, it is necessary to ideological framework that has guided tobacco policy for decades to be broken down, right down to the level of authorities and officials, and then rebuilt to function better under today's conditions.
