Jeffrey A. Singer
Last month, Mexico banned the sale, but not the use, of e‑cigarettes. As the Associated Press reports, Mexico’s vaping ban didn’t eliminate a $1.5 billion industry—it simply criminalized it. Legal businesses were shuttered, and drug cartels and other organized crime groups have moved in, using coercion and extortion to dominate production, distribution, and retail. What had been a regulated market is now a black market flooded with unregulated products, often assembled or repackaged from components sourced in China and the United States.
Mexican lawmakers justified the ban as a way to protect public health and shield youth from nicotine, but illegal sellers have no reason to check IDs or worry about product safety. Besides, as I have written previously, “public policy toward adult behavior should not be based on minors’ tastes and proclivities.”
The outcome is entirely predictable: demand continues, criminal networks gain, and consumers suffer, especially tobacco smokers using nicotine vapes to quit. Unlike Australia’s ban, there is no mechanism in Mexico’s statute that allows for clinicians to prescribe e‑cigarettes for tobacco harm reduction.
According to a report from ASIS Online, a publication for security management professionals, the cartels were already moving in on the vaping industry before the ban took effect:
Cartels have already started vying for market share. Rival cartels attacked dozens of vape dispensaries last year, aiming to control distribution of disposable vapes, including those laced with THC or marijuana, according to The Latin Times. Before the e‑cigarette ban, cartels would often extort a commission on vape sales from dispensaries. Other cartels would produce vapes and intimidate or extort businesses to sell their products…. The ban pushes vape sales underground in Mexico, potentially giving cartels a bigger opportunity to keep profiting from the devices.
The cartels’ operations have become highly diversified over the years, ranging from illicit drug trafficking and weapons smuggling to theft of petroleum and minerals, prostitution, human trafficking, and old-fashioned extortion. They already have the experience and infrastructure in place to make Mexico’s vaping ban a new profit center.
If state and federal lawmakers are serious about curbing cartel power, Mexico’s vaping ban is a case study in what not to do. Prohibition doesn’t starve criminal organizations—it feeds them while driving consumers toward more dangerous, unregulated products. Criminalizing a harm-reduction alternative is not public health policy; it’s a subsidy for organized crime.