Bad news is good news, and good news is ignored. This slogan summarises the modern-day media landscape. Modern media is addicted to scaremongering, and health policy is no exception. Every study, every mouse lab result, every lung injury gets front-page news, especially when it is falsely and negatively linked to nicotine. Outrage is guaranteed.

But nicotine products are all bad and there’s nothing good to report, right? We don’t need to look far to observe the opposite.

Already last year, Sweden officially became smoke-free with a smoking rate of 3.7%, and the European Parliament officially recognised that status earlier this year. Proof that a country can actually get there.

The UK shows how. A survey from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) confirmed that 4.8 million people in the UK have used vapes to quit smoking and that daily smoking among adults fell by 32% since 2020 to just 6.6%.

“When smokers have access to attractive, lower-risk alternatives, millions choose to leave cigarettes behind. Policymakers should be encouraging smokers to switch to safer smoke-free alternatives instead of creating barriers that keep them tied to cigarettes,” said Dr. Delon Human, leader of Smoke Free Sweden.

And New Zealand shows what happens when the policy actually changes. A published study found that the country’s progressive approach to vaping drove a fivefold acceleration in the rate of smoking decline, from 3.5% per year before 2018 to 17.9% between 2018 and 2023. Same country, same smokers, different rules. The decline didn’t just continue. It accelerated.

Did any of these findings make front-page news? It doesn’t seem so. The public and politicians are clearly unaware of them. Even in the UK, which was for a long time the frontrunner when it comes to progressive vaping regulation, 54% of adults think that vaping is as harmful as or more harmful than smoking.

Instead of correcting that, the UK launched a “crackdown on vapes targeting kids”. Youth vaping is the argument that ends every discussion before it starts, so here are the numbers. For every young person who vapes in Britain, there are 17 adult vapers, as Clive Bates writes on his Substack. And many more adult smokers who could switch, if the government wasn’t working so hard to stop them. 

Clive puts it plainly: “Everything the government is saying and doing will exacerbate the wildly incorrect risk perceptions about smoking and vaping.”

As public health policy, this is indefensible. Sweden, Britain and New Zealand are all running the same experiment, and it keeps producing the same result. Vaping doesn’t drive up smoking rates. It drives them down. We just never hear about it.

None of this is hidden. It’s published, peer-reviewed and ignored. Media and politicians don’t have a knowledge problem. They have a willingness problem. It is time to stop denying that vapes and nicotine pouches work.

Every year they spend getting this wrong, smokers who could have switched carry on smoking. That is the price of the story nobody wants to run.