There are moments when you read a policy proposal and genuinely wonder if reality has been completely ignored. The recent push to ban safer nicotine alternatives in the Philippines is one of those moments.

In the excellent analysis by Clive Bates, he dissects the reasoning behind these proposals with precision and, frankly, a level of patience they don’t deserve. 

At first glance, the arguments sound very familiar and the same old story. To ban vapes, heated tobacco, and other non-combustible products in order to “protect public health.” But when you look a little closer, the logic starts to collapse.

Banning the Solution, Protecting the Problem

The Philippines still faces a massive smoking problem. Around 35% of men and 4.4% of women smoke (WHO data), with millions of people still exposed to the harms of combustion, and that’s the real public health crisis here. Almost ⅓ of the population smokes, but instead of focusing on reducing this very thing, some groups are pushing to eliminate the products that could offer those people a way out. 

Not cigarettes. Not the most harmful products. The alternatives.

It’s hard to think of a clearer contradiction. We already have massive evidence around the world showing us that when you remove lower-risk options, you don’t eliminate demand for nicotine. You simply push people back toward smoking (which maintains the very problem they’re trying to fight against) or into the illicit market, with products that don’t go through quality control processes, which could put their lives into real danger.

And they still dare to call it a “public health measure”.

The Fantasy of Prohibition

One of the most striking points in Bates’ piece is how casually prohibition is presented as a solution. And the “comprehensive ban” (as they call it) selectively targets safer products while leaving the most dangerous ones widely available. And even worse, the justifications don’t hold up under basic scrutiny. 

Bans don’t create clarity; they create black markets. They don’t reduce demand; they shift supply into unregulated channels. They don’t simplify enforcement; they make it more chaotic, expensive, and vulnerable to corruption.

And if they think that banning products people actively want to use will somehow reduce illicit trade, they’re deliberately denying basic economic principles of how markets work (well… governments being governments).

Plus, at the core of this debate is something surprisingly simple: people use nicotine because they want to. Whether it’s for stimulation, mood, habit, or social reasons, that demand isn’t going away. As Bates points out, you cannot regulate it out of existence, you can only shape how that demand is met. Public health can choose to channel it toward lower-risk products or force it back into smoking and illicit supply. Those are the real-world options. Everything else is theory detached from reality, and it ignores  aspects of human behaviour.

The Bloomberg Effect

As we already know (very well), all roads lead to Rome. The arguments being used in the Philippines mirror a broader global strategy backed by Bloomberg-funded networks that promote prohibitionist approaches across low- and middle-income countries. These are often presented as grassroots public health voices, but in reality, they reflect a centralized, well-funded agenda that leaves little room for nuance, local context, or harm reduction. The result is a kind of policy export model: simple, rigid ideas applied to complex realities (regardless of the consequences).

If the goal is truly to reduce disease, suffering, and death caused by smoking, then the strategy should be obvious: help people move away from combustion as quickly as possible. That means recognizing the role of safer nicotine alternatives, regulating them, using taxation, standards, and information to guide behavior.

The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong

What makes this debate so frustrating is how avoidable the mistake is. The evidence, the market dynamics, and basic human behavior all point in the same direction. Yet policies are still being shaped by ideology rather than outcomes. Pretending nicotine dependence will simply not exist anymore is ineffective, detached from reality, and really, really dangerous.

And in a country where millions still smoke, the cost of that disconnect will not be theoretical. It will be measured in lives. Families will remain crying for the deaths of their loved ones due to smoking-related diseases, which could be easily avoided if the government had the right approach to the issue.

Nothing will truly change until harm reduction is treated for what it is: a basic human right.