How New Zealand Could Shift The Narrative On Vaping

There's a pattern keeps repeating itself. As smoking rates fall, youth vaping is brought to the forefront as a political weapon to justify rolling back access to vapes altogether. The argument is emotionally powerful, but it has rarely lined up with reality.

Nowhere is that clearer than in New Zealand, a country that has quietly become one of the strongest examples of how tobacco harm reduction can work without spiraling into a youth vaping crisis.

Let's talk about New Zealand...

How New Zealand is Ahead of the Game

For years, the scale of youth vaping has often been exaggerated, framed as a public health emergency on par with cigarette smoking. In particular, Geek Bar has taken a large brunt of that public scrutiny. 

That comparison has never really held up. Smoking still kills millions of people worldwide every year, while youth vaping, though worth monitoring and managing, has not shown anything close to that level of harm. Still, the narrative has proven politically effective, especially in places where adult vaping is successfully replacing smoking.

That’s why recent data from New Zealand matters so much. The country is frequently cited as one of the world’s biggest harm reduction success stories, and new evidence shows that youth vaping there has dropped dramatically rather than exploded.

Youth Vaping in New Zealand Has Dropped

According to the Year 10 Snapshot Survey released by Action on Smoking and Health New Zealand in late 2025, regular vaping among 14- and 15-year-olds has nearly been cut in half over just a few years. Regular use, defined as vaping at least once a month, fell from just over 20 percent in 2021 to a little above 11 percent today.

Daily vaping also declined, dropping from roughly 10 percent in 2022 to just over 7 percent.

At the same time, smoking among teens continues to move in the right direction. Nearly nine in ten surveyed students reported never having smoked, the highest level ever recorded. This combination of falling youth vaping and historically low youth smoking directly challenges the idea that making vapes accessible to adults inevitably leads to widespread teen use.

No Vape Bans?

The timing here is important. New Zealand didn’t rely on bans or prohibition to achieve these results. Instead, the country introduced formal vaping regulations in 2021, after an early period when vaping was largely unregulated. During that earlier phase, both adult and youth uptake increased rapidly. The more recent data suggests that smart regulation, not outright restriction, made the difference.

New Zealand’s approach focused on reducing youth access while preserving vaping as a viable alternative for adult smokers. Retailers face strict penalties for selling to minors. Flavor names were limited to reduce kid-friendly marketing without eliminating flavors themselves.

Most vape sales were restricted to age-limited specialty stores. Rather than pretending vaping should disappear, policymakers worked to bring the market under control in a way that acknowledged consumer behavior.

The payoff has been significant.

How They Curbed Smoking Cigarettes

New Zealand is now closing in on what it defines as “smoke-free” status, meaning a national smoking rate below 5 percent. In just over a decade, daily smoking fell from more than 16 percent to under 7 percent. 

Much of the fastest progress has occurred among younger adults, the same group often cited as being at risk from vaping. Instead of acting as a gateway to smoking, vaping appears to have accelerated smoking’s decline.

This success also highlights a key counterfactual that often gets ignored. If vaping had never been available, would smoking among young people really be lower today? Or would more teens still be growing up around smoking parents, normalizing cigarettes as the default nicotine product? Reduced adult smoking may itself be shaping healthier norms for the next generation.

Not everyone has celebrated New Zealand’s results. At international tobacco control meetings, the country has been criticized and even mocked for allegedly aligning with industry interests.

But the criticism says more about global politics than public health outcomes. New Zealand’s results directly challenge the dominant narrative favored by organizations that push bans and heavy restrictions on all consumer nicotine products, regardless of relative risk.

Australia is a Different Story...

A quick look across the Tasman Sea reinforces the point. Australia chose a very different path, making vapes prescription-only in 2021 and later limiting legal access to pharmacies, with narrow product ranges and high costs.

The result has been slower smoking cessation, a massive illicit vape market, and serious social harms tied to unregulated supply chains. Smoking rates in New Zealand have fallen roughly twice as fast as in Australia over the same period, with higher vaping uptake being the most obvious difference between the two countries.

None of this means the work is finished. The New Zealand data shows that vaping and smoking remain higher among some groups, particularly Māori youth. While daily vaping among Māori teens has declined, smoking rates have stalled.

Advocates point to ongoing misinformation about nicotine and vaping that disproportionately affects communities already facing health inequities. When harm reduction messages are drowned out by fear-based rhetoric, the people most at risk of smoking-related disease are often the ones left behind.

Final Thoughts

Even with those challenges, New Zealand’s overall record is hard to dismiss. The country has managed to reduce smoking to historic lows while also bringing youth vaping down through regulation rather than prohibition.

It stands as a real-world example that protecting young people and helping adults quit smoking are not mutually exclusive goals. When policy is grounded in evidence instead of panic, both can move in the right direction at the same time.

The truth is, us at eJuices.co believe that vaping is a great way to curb a nasty cigarette smoking habit as it is a marginally healthier option. For other options besides vaping, you can even look into nicotine pouches. 

Source: 

https://filtermag.org/new-zealand-cuts-smoking-youth-vaping/amp/