In the waiting room of an emergency clinic in Norwich, time doesn’t pass; it settles. It’s a matter that clings to a wet coat, sours the air with the bittersweet bite of disinfectant, and gathers, immobile, in the forgotten lukewarm coffee that doesn’t evaporate so much as cool, slowly, taking up space.
Hospitals manufacture this kind of physicality in a choreography of pauses. Time there isn’t measured by hands on a clock but by textures: the crease in plastic that leaves its imprint, the paper that rasps at your fingertips, the damp fabric that sticks to your forearm. And the disposable cup, still faintly warm, persistent insisting on occupying its patch of the world.
Lorraine, a fictitious name, like so many that public health invents to protect real privacy, didn’t come to the hospital to quit smoking. She came to accompany someone.
But science doesn’t interrogate only the sick. It interrogates whoever is nearby. The questions arrive down the same corridor as the gurneys: printed on the intake form, tucked into a field on a screen, spoken aloud by the voice that calls the next ticket with the calm of someone who isn’t calling people, but numbers. A borrowed biography will do. A body in waiting will do, too.
There, in the gap between one form and the next, a researcher with a badge on a lanyard asks what may be the simplest—and most political—question of all. The kind that can tilt the plot of a life.
“Do you smoke?”
The “yes” doesn’t answer. It unlocks. It’s a key that opens a fork in the road.
Lorraine gets a brief conversation, a digital referral to the NHS stop-smoking service, and a vape kit handed over with the mechanical ease of someone merely executing the next step. A DotPro with disposable pods. Calibrated nicotine: measured, dosed, and offered up as a promise to keep withdrawal’s dread in check.
The question driving the British clinical trial CoSTED borders on indecent in its modesty: could a few minutes of intervention, offered at the system’s most improvised point, shift a habit that has resisted for decades?
It isn’t a question for a political pulpit. It’s a question from the margins, from a waiting room, asked in a rush, asked where no one came for this: Asked with an object in your hand and a link on your phone. The method bets on the interval.
Six months later, continuous abstinence was higher in the group that received the kit than in the group that left with nothing but a leaflet.
In public health, small differences aren’t marginal. They multiply. Modest numbers cast the shadow of thousands of bodies. One extra point in a table becomes a shorter queue in the future. Fewer coughs on repeated mornings. Fewer hands reach for a pack by reflex. Statistics have no face, but they operate on faces.
That’s the point of departure. It’s also the tension that ran through the year.
Because 2025 was, over and over, exactly this: the moment when the system, without even touching the body, decided what to ban, what to tolerate, what (and whom) to push to the margins.
While technology was placed in Lorraine’s hand as a pragmatic chance, a device in the palm, a link on the phone, a protocol that doesn’t debate morality, in the offices of ministries and committees, it was treated as a threat. Instead of a shortcut to harm reduction, it became a target to be driven from the market by decree: by restriction, by outright ban, or by bans that didn’t need to say their own name.
Throughout the year, it oscillated between these competing grammars: care versus purity. On one side, the clinical language of the everyday: “referral,” “kit,” “cessation,” “minutes,” “group.” On the other hand, the abstract language of political morality: “risk,” “protection,” “doctrine,” “limit,” “compliance.”
In the corridor, the body asks for a solution.
In the cabinet, the text demands obedience.
And the air-conditioning doesn’t make anyone cough.
That’s when I began to distrust small numbers.
Not because they’re insignificant but because, in public policy, they tend to work as wildly disproportionate levers.
A milligram limit. A percentage in a warning label. A standstill period. A decree that swaps one word for another and, in that minimal gesture, shifts the world.
Tiny things that, from far away, look like prudence. Up close, they’re engineering. Doors closing, slowly, but with a lock.
The old war and the new best enemy
January
The politics of the cigarette remain legal. The attempt to leave it behind is not always.
As 2024 turned into 2025, my work didn’t shift gears. It simply tightened the same tempo. I went through a folder of notes, subdivided by provenance: where it came from; whose hands it passed through; on what date it first made contact with the world.
I kept a spreadsheet of events and sources, rows I fed and re-fed. I checked Clive Bates’s calendar and left a row of tabs open in my browser, arranged like an aircraft cockpit.
WhatsApp for Latin America. Signal for sources who prefer to whisper: brief exchanges, screen pressed close to the body, the trail handled like a hazard. The low volume. Email for the braver ones, for the reliable obsessives, and for the bureaucrats who reply with the entire body of the law pasted into the footer, as if authority lived in the text’s vertical sprawl.
With the first coffee of the year, I opened a new notebook. Two hundred pages, thick paper, plain cover. No ambition to become a cherished object. No desire to be kept.
On the table, the everyday as residue: the ring left by last year’s cup, a pen that dies mid-word, the dry click of a spoon against glass.
Outside, people are in a hurry. 2025 was already moving like someone with an appointment.
I began the month thinking the subject—nicotine, vaping, nicotine pouches, heated tobacco—was still safely confined to a niche. Until I opened a public-health document. In almost all of them, the contradiction was there: calm, official, repeated. The cigarette, the great killer, remained legal. Manageable. Normalized. A habit with a guaranteed place on the shelf and in the language.
At the gate of the neighboring school, teenagers who should already have been on vacation smoked with the naturalness of breathing. Without ceremony.
I watched them from the window.
Meanwhile, the alternatives designed to reduce harm for those who can’t quit were being pushed back into the same moral territory of sin, not by evidence, but by a normalized moral grammar. By framing. By tone.
In my notebook, I wrote a sentence that wasn’t a conclusion. It was a warning:
This year won’t be about science. It will be about control.
The war against cigarettes has a history of real victories. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) consolidated a global consensus: 183 countries joined as Parties. An accession that became a number in reports and a visible rule on airport doors, in bars, in hospital corridors. There it is stark, in white letters: NO SMOKING.
The treaty is paper. But it’s also a habit.
Its most emblematic instrument, the MPOWER package, became a canonical playbook for good governance: a primer on high taxes, smoke-free environments, advertising restrictions, graphic warnings, and access to treatment.
However, access to treatment remains scarce, concentrated primarily in wealthier countries. In former colonies and in the health systems of the Global South, it becomes a promise or a lost line in a document: rhetorical, irregular, nearly nonexistent. A service that, in practice, has no staff, no stock, no front door.
It was an architecture of control that worked, at least partly, until the ecosystem changed. Every successful policy risks falling in love with its own myth. When the world shifts, it doesn’t move with it; it tries to force it into shape. Instead of rewriting the manual, it tries to bend reality to its doctrine.
Even before 2025, the board no longer reduced the issue to “cigarette versus abstinence.” It was something else: pouches, heated tobacco products, vapes, pharmaceutical nicotine, licit and illicit markets, regional inequalities, and a question systematically ignored by those who prefer slogans to reality: What do we do with people who can’t (or don’t want to) quit right now, but want to stop smoking?
Many governments responded by reverting to a prohibitionist reflex, as if history were a straight line. And not a labyrinth: full of returns, dead ends, choices with no exit.
The Global Dispatches series would capture that movement as it forms into a wave over the year: rules announced as “protection” but operating as the suffocation of alternatives.
The detail matters. Because it’s in the detail that policy hides its own gesture. It doesn’t have to say “banned.” It’s enough to draw an impossible limit.
February
What begins as technical vocabulary ends as a moral veto. And language does more than regulate: it excludes.
February smelled like airports and bus terminals. I spent more time in lines than in chairs while my family finished their vacation. The laptop opened and shut with the intimacy of something that has nearly become a sympathetic organ. Between one gate and the next, I reviewed the same materials: websites, messages, press releases, draft texts, and legislative rumors.
Press releases, drafts, legislative rumors. A source in Brussels, who could just as well have been in Lima or Madrid, one of those people who speak with the cadence of someone afraid of being interrupted, wrote to me on Signal: “Nothing will be that different. Just worse. They’ve discovered a magic word: youth. With it, anything goes.”
I replied with an emoji that meant nothing. It was the sort of answer you send when you’re in a concourse, and you know the conversation is too serious to deserve a trace.
Then I opened TRIS. The way you look at the sky before a turbulent flight.
TRIS: the European system in which governments notify technical proposals that, weeks later, can become reality in twenty-seven countries at once.
TRIS has no voice, but it has a way of showing up. It arrives like a pop-up window that doesn’t ask permission: “A new notification has been published.” The rest is you, alone, reading the future in the language of Article 3, point (b).
*
That month, what struck me most was the drift in vocabulary. Nobody spoke anymore of a risk continuum—combustion versus vapor, smoke versus aerosol—not even obliquely. They spoke of “normalization.”
It was a useful word. It doesn’t demand numbers. It doesn’t demand comparison. It asks only for a moral intuition. And moral intuition is usually much faster than evidence.
I jotted down another sentence that day, almost as if I were preparing an epigraph: When the debate turns moral, evidence becomes a detail.
On March 11, I was in an airport with threadbare carpet and cold light. One power outlet is fought over by three people. A lukewarm coffee. More bitter than helpful.
I opened TRIS almost by reflex. And there it was: Luxembourg was notifying a draft law to impose a limit of 0.048 mg of nicotine per pouch. I read the number twice. Then a third time. 0.048 mg. Forty-eight micrograms. A value that fits inside a sliver of a line, a tiny unit, a decimal point that looks innocent.
To a lay reader, it appears to be a technicality. To anyone who follows the market and the mechanics of regulation, it sounds like a verdict. Is there a product that survives that?
I closed the laptop for a moment, as if that could suspend reality. Then I opened it again and asked someone who understands more than I do:
“Yes. That limit makes pouches practically ineffective. In practice, it’s a ban.”
They explained it right away: ordinary pouches contain between 3 and 20 mg of nicotine. The proposed limit—0.048 mg—constitutes between 0.2% and 1.6% of that value. In a 6 mg pouch, for instance, it would be just 0.8%. In practice, there’s no perceptible stimulus. It’s a ceiling designed to make the product unworkable.
That same day, another move. In the Netherlands, the government mandated retailer registration. The state governed by registry: by lists, by maps of points of sale. It wasn’t a ban. It was the geometry of a siege.
March
Flavors, packaging, gestures. The rhetoric of youth becomes the password for policies that listen to neither the young nor the adults.
March began to behave like a conveyor belt. On March 17, Poland announced its intention to ban disposable vapes and restrict flavors in nicotine pouches. A sentence like that, in politics, functions like the opening of a highway: the government announces the route before a single layer of asphalt has been poured.
On my WhatsApp, a contact in Warsaw summed up the dilemma with surgical accuracy, in a message that was short and dry: “They call it protection. We call it a return to cigarettes.”
That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, New Jersey introduced a bill with a different logic. The proposal didn’t try to demonize the product; it tried to make the producer accountable for the trash. I liked the dissonance. It was like hearing, in a room full of shouting, someone propose the tone of a conversation.
On March 18, my neighborhood stirred.
Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies approved a bill packed with restrictions: large graphic warnings, a ban on online sales, and a veto on sensory descriptors like “fruit,” “caramel,” and “chocolate.”
I pictured the text as a door with too many locks. It’s not that you can’t go in. It’s that you try, you tire, you give up, and you head to the street next door, where cigarettes are still for sale. No password. No barrier.
On the 19th, in the United Arab Emirates, standards for pouches were defined: a nicotine limit per unit, mandatory warnings, and composition rules.
The tone was technical, almost bureaucratic. Less “moral panic,” more “industrial manual.” And yet it was still part of the same phenomenon: states rearranging themselves to fit alternatives into a frame not to understand them.
On the 20th, in Thailand, Parliament chose to maintain a total ban, rejecting any path toward legalization. Narratively, it was the month’s most paradoxical scene: a country where conventional cigarettes remain legal, popular, and accessible, while the alternative remains prohibited.
A prohibition sustained not by conviction, but by inertia. And inertia, sometimes, is the most brutal form of decision.
On the 24th, Malaysia decided to postpone the ban on the display of vapes at retail. Postponement tends to be underestimated. But often it’s postponement that reveals the friction between moral ideal and brute reality: logistics, enforcement, commerce. There is still enough resistance in the physical world to slow the normative impulse.
March ended with a clean, unmistakable feeling: this was no longer a sequence of isolated cases. It was as if someone, somewhere, had issued a global command: tighten the siege.
All of it before World No Tobacco Day. Before World Vape Day.
As the siege tightened from the outside, the fight sharpened from within.
Still in March, a study published in JAMA Network Open concluded that vaping doesn’t help people quit smoking. The text suggested that outcomes depended less on social reality and more on methodological choices and interpretation.
This kind of dispute isn’t new. And it isn’t merely academic. In public health, a paper becomes a headline. The headline becomes “evidence” for policy. Policy becomes daily life. What breaks in Excel or Word ends up in the lungs.
The year would deliver an even more dramatic example. A study published in Mexico claimed extreme levels of BTX (benzene, toluene, and xylenes) in disposable vapes. But a methodological autopsy, performed by independent critics, found serious errors: swapped units, invalid comparisons, scales inflated by orders of magnitude. The final recommendation was blunt: retraction.
The pattern is dark. When a dispute has already been moralized, a flimsy study isn’t merely tolerated but is useful.
The rush for “impact” meets the hunger for justification. And public health, which ought to be an antidote to panic, sometimes turns into its own laboratory.
April
The aesthetic of purity. Pharmaceutical, clean, standardized. The new morality of nicotine prefers the laboratory to the street.
April began with a small relief. Bulgaria, at first, rejected the proposal to extend the smoking ban to vapes in outdoor areas. I remember thinking: maybe there was still room for nuance.
But the relief didn’t last long. 2025 was not going to be a kind year to nuance.
In New South Wales, Australia, a new producer-responsibility law for recycling strengthened the environmental argument. That became a recurring subtheme throughout the year. Disposables had turned into convenient symbols: visible, colorful, easy to demonize, and even easier to photograph next to a turtle.
Elsewhere on the map, a new object of power was taking shape: the so-called “positive list” of ingredients allowed in e-liquids. Anything not on it becomes, by definition, prohibited.
This isn’t only regulation. It’s an aesthetic of cleanliness. The state speaks in the name of interests that only it can recognize, and decrees the existence of only what it knows how to name.
In my notebook, I drew the image of a bottle that, little by little, became a laboratory vial. White label, black letters. No excess. Next to it, I wrote a short line, almost a caption: The future they want looks like a pharmacy.
In Hong Kong, a bill to ban the possession and use of vapes in public spaces revealed a different ambition. It wasn’t just about controlling commerce. It was the gesture itself that had to be outlawed.
April was that: less “debate” and more “sanitation.” Less effort to reduce harm, more zeal to reduce visibility.
May
The generational ban is beautiful on paper. But the informal market doesn’t read decrees. The cigarette-free generation and the smuggling generation.
In May, policy developed an itch to write the future as if it were a contract. The idea of a generational ban, prohibiting the sale of tobacco to anyone born after a certain cutoff, gained appeal as a form of clean engineering.
In the Maldives, the measure was ratified for everyone born on or after 2007. There is a kind of mathematical beauty in it: by denying access to future generations, the state promises a new world without confronting the old one. It’s the most comfortable utopia. The bill comes due later.
I was at a cheap hotel desk—walls too white, air-conditioning too cold—working on something that didn’t interest me, and that had nothing to do with harm reduction, when I read the news.
My pen froze midair.
I thought about how the history of tobacco is also the history of parallel markets, inequality, those who evade, and those who get punished. A tobacco-free generation, written into law, can very easily become, in practice, a generation raised on contraband.
That same week, in Iraq, the government reversed an import ban on vapes after admitting the measure was feeding the black market. It was one of the year’s most honest moments.
Not out of virtue, but out of embarrassment, reality imposed itself, as it tends to do when it’s been ignored for too long.
And still in May, Chile’s law—the one my friend Ignacio Leiva worked so hard to build—went into effect. But with a detour: the approach was more “conventional.” Vapes and heated products were bundled under the same umbrella of prohibitions and restrictions applied to tobacco. A clear milestone, with a date stamped on it.
I like clear dates. They make accountability possible. But clarity, sometimes, also hides a mistake: treating different risks as if they were the same.
June
The product disappears. The habit—and the desire—do not.
And in the vacuum that regulation creates, informality blooms.
June brought a cut in the calendar: the United Kingdom implemented a ban on disposable vapes. The scene felt lifted from an Italian neorealist film: a date circled in red, retailers adjusting their stock, official notices wrapped in the familiar language of “protection” and “the environment.”
But in daily life, measures like this acquire a body. They have texture.
The impact spreads in small ruptures: the interrupted gesture, the habit forced to find another form, the product that vanishes from the shelf with no visible explanation.
Over a video call, I visited a small shop on a side street.
The owner—an Arab man, who used to show up always cheerful, full of positivity—held up a box of disposable vapes the way you might display a dead animal.
He said only: “I know this is trash. But do you know what takes its place?”
He wasn’t defending disposables. He was afraid of the vacuum. And into a vacuum, the informal market enters with its usual elegance: no warnings, no standards, no taxes, no oversight.
While the U.K. tightened the noose around disposables (the easiest format to hate), the more ambitious project, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which proposes a generational ban, continued its legislative crawl. Still unfinished. The country of CoSTED seemed to live in two times at once: the time of immediate action and the time of historic promise. And in public health, the symbol often arrives wearing the costume of a result.
July
The veto is written in milligrams. Small limits, gigantic consequences: when technicalities operate as a silent prohibition.
July was the month I stopped calling it a “wave.” I started calling it a system.
It’s the month when flow hardens into structure. You let go of the image of the “wave”—episodic, oscillating, episodic—and accept that what’s running now is a system with its own grammar, whose effects present themselves as technicalities but function as effective bans. It is, perhaps, the most quietly devastating month of the year. So far.
In Denmark, a limit of 9 mg of nicotine per pouch came into force. Limits are almost always presented as forms of protection. And sometimes they are.
But in public health, a limit can also function as an obstacle. It can make the product less useful precisely for the people who need it most: the heavy smoker, the exhausted worker, the person for whom abstinence isn’t an abstraction but an actual tremor.
In Australia, as expected, the pharmaceutical model was consolidating. Tighter rules, restricted flavors, standardized packaging, and the product pushed behind the clinical counter. It’s a political and cultural choice. A way of removing it from everyday life, from pleasure, from identity.
And then, Kyrgyzstan. A country I knew nothing about, unfortunately. A total ban took effect. Total bans have a brutal simplicity. They don’t ask for nuance. Or sophisticated enforcement. Or a risk continuum. They ask for only two things: police and silence.
In the background, the European Union, with its habitual air of civilization, debated taxation, directives, and the possibility of placing reduced-risk products inside the same fiscal universe as tobacco.
Few things shape behavior as powerfully as price. And a few things shape price, like tax. That part of the debate is always the most decisive, and almost always the least sexy.
August
Sanitizing the gesture, not the risk. Smoke and vapor blurred under the same gaze. The politics of scenery, trying to erase addiction from the landscape.
August brought the politics of public space to the fore. The idea of smoke-free areas expanded beyond indoor environments, extending to beaches, parks, and the perimeters around schools.
The logic is clear: protect children, reduce normalization, change habits, and, at the limit, remove from view the aesthetic of smoke. Sanitize the landscape.
And it works—especially in the case of cigarettes.
But 2025 did something curious. It widened the perimeter of restriction and, at the same time, blurred the difference between smoke and vapor, as if every visible gesture necessarily carried the same invisible harm.
A public-health source in my country told me on the phone, tired: “We’re trying to get cigarettes out of the scene.” I understand. I support it, in part. But I also saw something else: when you remove everything from the scene, you may end up dismantling the raft while the current is still carrying people.
In 2025, it became necessary to make explicit, almost didactic, almost embarrassing, that nicotine is not tobacco.
It also became necessary to insist on the obvious thing policy prefers to scramble: consuming nicotine is not the same as consuming the smoke of industrial leaf in combustion. In the hierarchy of risk, smoke occupies a different place than aerosol, for instance.
But politics has a habit of trading gradations for absolutes whenever it finds a word that works. In 2025, the word was “youth.” And, as if that weren’t enough, “children.” The other was “normalization,” repeated until it became evidence by sheer insistence.
Once those words become a password, harm comparison turns into a technical detail. And technical details are the first things to be discarded.
August is the month when the politics of the body becomes the politics of the gaze. It’s no longer only about restricting substances, but about stripping appearances of legitimacy, vetoing gestures, erasing traces from the landscape.
September
Ex-smokers, micro-businesses, solitary attempts. Lives outside the frame of the paper, the official document, and the livestream.
September brought two types of documents. They looked nothing alike. One was public. The other, intimate.
The public one was a letter signed by dozens of experts—an alert against equalizing the taxes and regulatory regimes for cigarettes and vapes. An attempt to keep public policy from sliding into fiscal morality.
The intimate one was the messages I received from ex-smokers. Some had become vape shop owners. Others were occasional defenders—no script, no title. Others were simply people who still use nicotine and try, in their own way, to keep their distance from combustion.
The messages arrived on WhatsApp, without ceremony. And I’m terrible with these technologies. I maintain intact my reflexes of an analog creature. “I’m not an activist. I just don’t smoke anymore.” “If they ban it here, I’ll go back. That’s it.” “It’s what worked for me.” These people never show up at press conferences. They have no lobby. No scientific committee. They have the everyday: stress, work, dependence. Attempt, relapse, attempt.
That same month, New Zealand backed away from a technical requirement: the requirement for removable batteries. They avoided a market collapse. It was a useful reminder: the state may want to draw the world like an architectural blueprint, but the world insists on being a construction site.
And underneath everything, inequality kept running as combustion’s engine.
In the United Kingdom, a statistic turned into a moral map: 28.6 billion cigarettes a year. Consumption is concentrated among the most disadvantaged classes in regions marked by economic scarring. It’s no longer a “mass habit.” It’s a marker of inequality.
That point is decisive if you want to understand the year’s political tragedy.
When governments close off or make it harder to access lower-risk alternatives, the bill isn’t paid by an abstraction, “the user,” “the consumer.” It’s paid by a social profile.
People with lower incomes are more exposed to the physical grind of work and to chronic stress. People with less access to cessation services. People are more vulnerable to informality and the illicit market.
That’s why Lorraine’s scene matters so much.
There, the vape isn’t a gadget.
It’s equity policy, shrink-wrapped as a kit.
October
Compliance as punishment, and administrative sorrow. When harm isn’t a mistake but obedience, policies that do everything except what they’re for.
October was execution.
No more surprise, no scandal, no visible resistance. Just mechanical compliance: policy as a stamp, law as an autonomous device that no longer requires explanation. The conflict’s center of gravity shifts into a particular kind of attrition; the kind produced by normative obedience that detaches itself from the public function it was meant to serve.
In Luxembourg, what in March had sounded like a surreal number acquired the texture of law. TRIS, which at the start of the year was an omen, became a timetable.
They alerted me by email. I opened the notification once more and felt something odd. It wasn’t anger. It was a kind of administrative sorrow, as if I were watching a decision that no longer needed to justify itself. It only needed to be carried out.
And execution has a specific cruelty. It is quiet. Harm appears to be merely a consequence of compliance.
November
Banning what doesn’t yet exist. Laws too broad for reality. The future was regulated as if it were a threat.
November brought Mexico, one of the countries I admire most, and one I’ve loved visiting, and a prohibition drafted to reach even what does not yet exist.
The wording was broad enough to encompass future “vaporization systems.”
That’s revealing. You don’t merely ban an object. You ban the mental category of the object. You ban innovation in advance.
I spoke with a Latin American researcher I talk to often. He sounded tired of repeating the same argument: “You can hate vaping. But banning it doesn’t erase demand. It only changes who supplies it.”
That is what 2025 seemed to forget, in several corners of the world: demand is not a light switch. It’s a current.
In autumn or spring—depending on the hemisphere—the WHO published the sixth edition of its report on tobacco-prevalence trends. It included estimates from 2000 to 2024, projections through 2030, and a global summary of product use among 13- to 15-year-olds, including e-cigarettes.
That snapshot of the world permitted two readings at once. And 2025 lived inside that tension. The good news was clear: prevalence was falling in many regions, and tobacco control, in the classic sense, worked in your minimal part (timidly, like a tide that is about to withdraw).
The conflict zone was also clear: new products are reconfiguring the hierarchy of risk, the very idea of an alternative, and the market of desire itself. The debate stops being only about combustion. It becomes a moral dispute over nicotine.
The distinction between nicotine and smoke—which I found myself repeating all year with an almost pedagogical insistence—turned into a contest of power. Who gets to name risk?
Underneath that contest lies a datum no one can erase.
The WHO describes tobacco as a product capable of killing up to half of its users. It also says it kills “more than 7 million” people a year, including about 1.6 million non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. In other informational materials—by the WHO itself and by PAHO/WHO—the magnitude is sometimes rounded to “around 8 million” when estimates are aggregated.
I noted, for later, whether that statistical rounding might be part of the anatomy of the political error born of fear. But the numerical variation doesn’t change what matters. What matters is the scale of the catastrophe.
That is what makes 2025 so brutal.
Cigarettes remain the planet’s leading mechanism of preventable death.
But part of the public—and political—debate preferred to train its efforts on a war of symbols, in which nicotine, reduced to the status of a cursed molecule, was made to occupy the place of the absolute enemy.
Only it isn’t nicotine that kills.
What kills, above all, is combustion.
The rest is the risk hierarchy.
And hard choices.
December
Two closing scenes: between the hospital and the minister’s office, the choice of policy: build the bridge, or barricade the road.
I’m writing at the end of December, carried along by the Christmas atmosphere, close to my children. And an honest retrospective of the year has to begin with a simple acknowledgment: yes, there is a real problem to face.
Youth misuse exists. There are products designed with adolescent appeal. There is marketing disguised as influence. There are disposables that become trash and fashion at the same time, an aesthetic that seduces as it pollutes.
But 2025 revealed something more structurally unsettling. Governments proved themselves perfectly capable of instrumentalizing the idea of “protecting youth” as a rhetorical scarecrow, a mobilizing ghost used to justify policies that, in practice, punish adults and teenagers and the elderly alike.
They push part of consumption into informal circuits, where there is no standard, no control, no exit door. And more than that: youth, invoked as an argument, is rarely seen—or heard—as a subject. It serves more as a moral shield and sword than as the real addressee of decisions.
That is the machinery of elegant prohibitionism.
You don’t need to say “banned.”
You just need to draw an impossible limit.
You don’t need to arrest anyone.
You just need to make it unworkable.
You don’t need to debate.
You just need to parameterize.
And you don’t need to admit you chose smoke.
You just need to say you chose caution.
On the other side, 2025 also exposed the risk of pro-vape tribalism. When every criticism is dismissed as moralism, and every regulator becomes a caricature or an enemy, you lose the chance to build what actually saves lives: intelligent regulation, capable of balancing protection and access, risk and pragmatism.
In 2025, after moving through the slick carpet of COP11—the Conference of the Parties—through the solemnity of speeches, the laminated badges, the white hum of promises and their closed doors, I ended up back in the hospital corridor. The one where Lorraine waited, not knowing whether she was waiting for someone or for something.
I went back to the street with no noble name, to the grimy floor, to the coffee that no longer warms. Because that’s where policy stops being an abstraction. Not in the plenary hall. Not in the paper. Not in the lives, the podcasts, the shorts with animated charts.
Decisions gain density in a theater without an audience. That’s where they take shape. Acquire weight. Because that’s where a regulatory choice stops being language and becomes matter. And matter has a smell. It has a body. It has consequences.
December is a closing. But it isn’t an epilogue.
Happy New Year, Hierarchy of Virtue, Economy of Silence
There are two possible final scenes for this year. In the first, public health returns to the hospital—not as a symbol, but as a practice. It offers tools, measures outcomes, learns from its limitations, and adjusts course. The vape is neither celebrated nor demonized. It is treated for what it is: a bridge.
Every bridge is a delicate and impure artifice. It does more than connect shores; it inaugurates displacements. It exists to cross what is still an abyss, to allow passage over the unresolved, over what still burns, hesitates, or remains. To cross a bridge is always an act of passage: from the place one knows to the one suspected or see advance; from who we were to who we might become. Some bridges propel us forward, others lead us back, but never to the same point.
In the second, public health stays in the office. It legislates as if the world were a well-laid-out manual. It turns nicotine into sin, the smoker into a deviation, harm reduction into an embarrassed concession. It protects what it calls youth with solemn words, while quietly delivering the people who need it to the continuity of combustion.
As if caution were neutrality. As if refusing a bridge were merely waiting, and not letting someone fall.
December is always the month of closing accounts. And, in my case, in my corner of the world, in the Southern Hemisphere, of trying to steal a few days at the beach until February. But in 2025, it ended with a kind of coherence that frightens.
Measures approved with future effective dates. Definitions broadened until they swallow the exceptions. Restrictions that looked small until they became the standard.
It was a year-end in which the machinery was already turning on its own: less debate, more automatism. And more authoritarianism. As if politics had found its formula, and all that remained was to replicate it.
On the second-to-last night of the year, I sat with my notebook—the one from early January—now crumpled, its corners worn down, its cover stained from use- and I reread sentences written without ambition, without knowing they would end up as a summary.
“This year won’t be about science. It will be about control.”
“When the debate turns moral, evidence becomes a detail.”
They weren’t conclusions. They were early warning drafts of a reality that gradually confirmed itself: first as a hypothesis (perhaps even a naïve one), then as a pattern.
I thought about the cigarette—this old, insistent object, moving through centuries with an almost absurd immunity—and about how I lived with it for thirty years. I thought about the brutal contrast that 2025 laid bare.
The product that kills the most remains legal, managed, and available. And the one that could reduce harm is pushed into suspicion, unworkability, crime, and silence. As if the consecrated habit deserved administration, while the attempt at change counted as a threat.
And then I remembered the number. That small number that opens and closes worlds: 0.048 mg. In Norwich’s waiting room, policy fit inside a kit handed over in a few minutes. In Brussels, Warsaw, Luxembourg, and London, it hid inside a parameter, a list, a technical limit that looks neutral until it functions as a veto.
Between a clinical question and a unit of measure, 2025 left behind a kind of evidence that is hard to refute; less scientific than narrative:
When policy abandons the hierarchy of risk and adopts the hierarchy of virtue, it does not eliminate harm. It merely displaces it. It merely chooses where it will concentrate. And almost always it concentrates where the voice is lowest.
Essentially, 2025 preserved cigarettes while criminalizing their alternatives.
~ https://www.disobedientmargins.com/s/global-dispatches
