India’s vaping ban was intended to eliminate a public health risk. Seven years later, it has largely eliminated the legal market instead. Vaping products continue to be available through informal channels, most recently drawing attention after footage of an IPL cricket player allegedly using an e-cigarette went viral. The episode highlights a question policymakers have yet to answer : banning a product is not the same as eliminating it.
The Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes Act PECA was enacted on a clear logic, restricting access to vaping products and demand will fall. The law reflected concerns about youth vaping, nicotine use, and public health. Those concerns were real. What isn’t clear is whether prohibition has been the most effective way to address them. Years after the ban was introduced, the evidence points to a more complicated picture. Vaping products remain available through informal channels, online networks, and grey-market suppliers. The market has not disappeared. It has simply moved underground.
That distinction matters because prohibition changes where activity occurs, not necessarily whether it occurs at all. When products are pushed underground, regulators lose visibility into the market. Age restrictions become harder to enforce. Product standards become impossible to verify. Consumers have little assurance about what they are purchasing or where it came from. A regulated market may not eliminate risk, but it provides tools to manage it. A black market offers no safeguards.
This is where India’s approach increasingly raises difficult questions. The current framework assumes that prohibition is the most effective way to reduce harm. Yet history suggests that restricting legal supply does not automatically eliminate demand. Bhutan offers a good example. In 2010, it introduced one of the world’s strictest tobacco prohibitions. The policy was intended to curb consumption, but it also fuelled illicit trade and cross-border smuggling. Eventually, authorities were forced to acknowledge the limitations of prohibition and relax aspects of the policy. The lesson was not that tobacco is harmless. It was that demand often survives long after legal markets disappear.
