The fight against prohibitionism should focus on promoting an informed understanding of harm reduction in nicotine consumption, highlighting its proven benefits as well as the importance of individual and collective freedoms.
Prohibitionism and the paradigm of perfect health are utopias that ignore reality and scientific evidence. They also overlook the complexity and nuances of public health and the social and economic realities of individuals.
The cost of prohibitionism is evident in how denying scientific proof harms consumers and society at large.
Several countries have maintained a prohibitionist regulation of reduced-risk nicotine products for nearly twenty years, while others abstain from any regulation. Some haven’t even set a minimum purchase age.
Despite these disparities in access, the search for and consumption of lower-risk products as alternatives to combustible cigarettes continues to rise, with one of the main sources being the illicit market.
Unfortunately, clandestine markets and smuggling not only generate violence but also create inadequate sanitary conditions that endanger people’s health. Furthermore, they deprive those who could benefit from rigorously regulated, less harmful products, such as electronic cigarettes and other forms of smokeless nicotine consumption.
Despite this, many authorities maintain prohibitionist rhetoric and stances, ignoring growing scientific evidence that supports harm reduction as an effective public health strategy. This reality raises a fundamental question: What type of evidence would opponents accept as valid?
For some, the resistance to accepting scientific evidence seems unyielding. Despite numerous studies and testimonies demonstrating the benefits of harm-reduction products, prohibitionists persist in their denial.
This poses a logical issue: how can anything be proven if evidence is not accepted? This perpetual skepticism implies that to present proof, one must provide proof that the proof has been proven, creating an insurmountable barrier to accepting new evidence.
Why do prohibitionists deny evidence and debate?
Examining the roots of prohibitionism reveals that what is prohibited often seems naturally forbidden due to cultural and historical prejudices. Habits and customs, good or bad, are relative and vary according to context.
What is considered harmful today could have been considered acceptable or beneficial in another time or place.
The case of nicotine is emblematic. Drugs, whether legal or illegal, can have multiple effects: curing, saving lives, providing pleasure, or causing harm.
The pharmaceutical industry produces drugs that are legally consumed in most countries, as do tobacco, alcohol, coffee, yerba mate, and tea. Yet, the linguistic and cultural demonization of certain substances persists.
Control and Morality
One of the central aspects of prohibitionism is control over substance use, initially under religious influence and later commercial. Such control has defined the acceptance of certain substances and the prohibition of others based on ethnic and ideological prejudices.
This dynamic has led, for example, to the acceptance of alcohol and the prohibition of hallucinogens, a paradigm that is almost religiously maintained in contemporary medical and pharmaceutical control.
The pharmaceutical industry benefits from illness, promoting the medicalization of human behavior with the enormous economic benefit of drug sales, reinforced by marketing strategies.
We live in a society where there are drugs for everything: sadness, fatigue, insomnia, and even to enhance sexual life. When profitable pharmaceuticals replace substances like opium and morphine, the latter are banned.
The Hypocrisy of Prohibition
Banning the consumption of substances that do not harm others is like banning the right to have a dissenting opinion. The individual power to decide to consume something rationally and informedly, even if it harms one’s own health, is a right, not a crime.
The tradition of individual freedom is a political right that has separated religious moral control from private conduct. However, prohibition promotes hypocrisy and superficial morality. No one stops consuming something prohibited as long as it continues to be produced.
Prohibitionists, in their dogmatic conviction, act as agents of private interests. They cite science when convenient, but their stance is more ideological than scientific. By denying science and facts, they defend a utopia of perfect health influenced by economic interests.
Increasingly, we see public agents, politicians, jurists, and communicators clinging to these dogmas, promoting intolerance and conventions about what can or cannot be consumed.
Prohibitionism, especially in the context of nicotine, electronic cigarettes, and now nicotine pouches, is presented as a stance that ignores scientific evidence in favor of cultural, moral, and economic prejudices.
Its resistance to accepting proof that demonstrates the benefits of harm reduction perpetuates a cycle of skepticism and control that is detrimental to consumers and contrary to the principles of individual freedom and public health.
The fight against prohibitionism must focus on promoting an informed and evidence-based understanding of harm reduction in nicotine consumption, highlighting its proven benefits, as well as the importance of individual and collective freedoms.