Summary: Venezuela’s Ministry of Health has issued a resolution banning the manufacture, storage, distribution, circulation, commercialization, import, export, use, consumption, advertising, promotion, and sponsorship of electronic nicotine delivery syste
The Venezuelan Ministry of Health recently issued a resolution banning the manufacture, storage, distribution, circulation, commercialization, import, export, use, consumption, advertising, promotion, and sponsorship of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS, commonly known as e-cigarettes) within the country.
In addition, the resolution also prohibits zero-nicotine products and related accessories. According to relevant reports, this move makes Venezuela the third country in South America, after Argentina and Brazil, to fully ban e-cigarettes.
Two months ago, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had asked the government’s medical science team to consider such a ban. The Venezuelan Ministry of Health said the move was in response to warnings from the World Health Organization, which, as is well known, has consistently taken an unfriendly stance toward e-cigarettes.
However, Alberto Gomez, Community Manager for the World Vapers’ Alliance, said Venezuela’s ban on harm reduction products is a setback for public health. He said thousands of Venezuelans have successfully quit conventional tobacco through e-cigarettes and improved their health. Now they will find it harder to buy these products, and more smokers will also find it difficult to switch to less harmful alternatives.
Gomez believes the ban will bring unintended consequences: users will turn to the illegal market or return to cigarettes, and smokers will be unable to switch to lower-risk products. This will worsen public health and increase healthcare costs caused by smoking. In addition, the illegal market will not regulate sales to minors, products will not undergo safety and quality control, and the government will receive no tax revenue. The ban will not solve any problems.
South America’s attitude toward e-cigarettes, as well as its actual e-cigarette market, has long been highly contradictory. On the one hand, the Latin American market as a whole tends to be conservative in e-cigarette regulation, with most of the region’s major economies enforcing bans on e-cigarettes; on the other hand, because these bans are poorly enforced and smuggling is rampant, an extremely active e-cigarette black market has emerged, as seen in Brazil.An important reason is the differing e-cigarette regulations among neighboring countries and the flourishing import-export trade. For example, Paraguay, one of the few countries in Latin America where e-cigarettes are clearly legal, is currently the main source of e-cigarettes for the Brazilian market:E-cigarettes enter legally regulated Paraguay first, and then, in an "ant-moving-house" style of small-scale repeated transport, they are brought into Brazil through two border crossings in Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná. They are then concentrated in Goiás, in central Brazil, which serves as a warehousing and logistics hub, and from there distributed across the country via highways linking Brazil’s northern, northeastern, and southeastern regions.Data from Ipec Intelligence shows that in 2018, only about 500,000 adults in Brazil had tried e-cigarettes; in 2020, that number exceeded 940,000; and in 2021, it further rose to more than 2 million, an increase of over 300%.Overall, while Venezuela has indeed banned e-cigarettes at the regulatory level this time, whether the ban will, like Brazil’s, end up as little more than words on paper remains to be seen.
