When governments ban products, they rarely erase demand. What they usually do instead is push that demand somewhere else.
That basic economic reality matters a lot in nicotine policy, where people don’t simply quit nicotine because their preferred option disappears. Flavored vape juice bans are one of the clearest examples of this dynamic playing out in real time.
So, let's talk about why banning flavored vapes is a bad idea...
Banning Flavored Vapes is Bad and Dangerous
Across the United States, many states and cities have restricted or outright banned the sale of flavored vape products, both in stores and online. These policies are typically framed as efforts to protect young people, and that goal is understandable.
The thing is, the conversation does often ignore an inconvenient truth: adults also use flavored vaping products, and for many smokers trying to quit cigarettes, flavors make switching away from combustible tobacco easier and more sustainable. The better the taste, the higher the success. We can thank products like the RODMAN MVP, with its array of delicious flavored vapes.
But when those options are taken off the table, people don’t just shrug and move on. They adapt... which, in this case, is bad.
Researchers have been warning about this for years. In 2022, Michael Siegel and Amanda Katchmar published a paper in Preventive Medicine that pulled together longitudinal data, econometric analyses, and real-world policy outcomes.
Their conclusion was blunt: restricting flavored e-cigarettes risks pushing some users back to conventional cigarettes. The research highlighted substitution effects, meaning when flavored vapes become harder to get, a portion of users replace them with something else, often combustible cigarettes, which are far more harmful.
That concern didn’t stay theoretical. In December 2024, a quasi-experimental study by Friedman and colleagues published in JAMA Health Forum examined state-level flavor restrictions in the U.S. The authors found that while vaping among young adults declined, cigarette smoking rose.
Their takeaway was striking: any public health gains from reduced vaping could be partially or fully offset by increased smoking. In other words, the policy might look good on paper while quietly undermining its own goals.
More evidence followed, of course. A large, multi-state analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December 2025 reached a similar conclusion. The researchers observed modest declines in e-cigarette use after flavor bans, paired with unintended increases in cigarette use. This pattern kept repeating across different datasets and time periods, making it harder to dismiss as a fluke.
Less Vapes Means MORE Cigarettes
The evidence has now gone international. Michael Pesko and Abigail Friedman have published the first study outside the United States that causally links flavored e-cigarette bans to higher cigarette sales.
Their research focused on several Canadian provinces, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and others that implemented flavor restrictions. Using retail sales data from 2018 to 2023, primarily from convenience stores and gas stations, the researchers compared provinces with flavor bans to those without them.
The results were hard to ignore. Cigarette sales increased by nearly 10 percent after flavor restrictions went into effect. In gas stations and convenience stores, flavored vaping products all but disappeared, while sales of tobacco-flavored and unflavored vaping products jumped dramatically.
At the same time, cigarette sales rose sharply. Even in Canada, which has some of the strictest tobacco control policies in the world, consumers substituted cigarettes when preferred vaping products were restricted.
That point matters. If substitution happens even in a tightly regulated environment like Canada, it suggests this isn’t a uniquely American problem or a quirk of a weak regulatory system. It’s human behavior. When lower-risk alternatives become less appealing or less accessible, some people revert to higher-risk ones.
The Youth Vaping Connection
Most flavored vaping bans are justified as a way to curb youth vaping. But basing policy for millions of adults on the preferences and behaviors of minors is a questionable approach. Youth vaping has been steadily declining and is now at its lowest recorded levels.
There’s a growing case that the spike in youth vaping may have been a temporary trend rather than a permanent public health crisis.
Meanwhile, adult smoking rates have fallen dramatically over the past decade, and safer nicotine alternatives have played a role in that progress. Undermining those alternatives risks slowing or even reversing gains that took years to achieve.
If the real goal is fewer people smoking cigarettes, policy should focus on making lower-risk options more accessible and appealing to adults who smoke, not less.
Flavor bans do the opposite.
Conclusion
These bans remove one of the main reasons smokers switch in the first place and quietly nudge some users back toward combustible tobacco. The evidence is piling up, from multiple countries, multiple datasets, and multiple research teams. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
Public health policy works best when it aligns with real-world behavior, not when it assumes people will simply comply because a law says they should. But we know the truth. These e-liquids actually help people quit smoking, which is, without question, far more detrimental to our health than flavored vape juice.
Let's be real for a second: your flavored vape juice isn't going anyway anytime soon. So, let's all enjoy our healthier alternative, pick up your favorite e-juice products on eLiquid.com.
Source:
https://www.cato.org/blog/unintended-consequences-banning-flavored-vapes
