Walk past any tuck shop near a university campus in Lahore, Karachi, or Islamabad today, and you will likely see it: a teenager exhaling a plume of mango-ice or bubblegum-flavoured vapour, phone in one hand, sleek device in the other. It looks harmless. It smells like candy. And that is precisely the problem.Pakistan’s vape market is expanding at an alarming pace, and its fastest-growing customer base is not adult smokers trying to quit — it is young people who have never smoked a cigarette in their lives. The tobacco industry knows exactly what it is doing.
Having spent decades watching cigarette consumption decline amid stronger regulation and public awareness, it has found a new frontier: a product wrapped in fruity flavours, sleek pastel designs, and aggressive social media marketing, engineered to appeal to teenagers who would never have picked up a cigarette. Even existing smokers are being drawn in, treating vaping as a “clean” alternative for spaces where they cannot smoke — unaware that they are simply trading one form of nicotine dependency for another, often a more potent one.This is not an accident. It is a business strategy.
The next generation of paying customers has to come from somewhere. If cigarette smoking is falling out of fashion, vaping is the industry’s calculated bridge to keep young people hooked on nicotine for life.But here is what the sleek packaging and sweet flavours do not tell you: the chemicals used to create those flavours were never designed to be inhaled.Consider diacetyl, a compound used for decades to produce a buttery taste in food — most famously in microwave popcorn. Diacetyl is safe to eat. It is not safe to breathe. Workers in popcorn factories who inhaled it in high concentrations over years developed a severe, irreversible lung disease so specific to this exposure that doctors now call it “popcorn lung.” Multiple factory workers won multimillion-dollar lawsuits after the chemical permanently damaged their airways. Denmark banned diacetyl outright in 2003, recognising the danger it posed when inhaled rather than swallowed.That same chemical, or close relatives of it, has turned up in flavoured vaping products — including the custard, bakery, and fruit flavours marketed heavily to young users.
The United States Food and Drug Administration has formally listed diacetyl as a Harmful and Potentially Harmful Constituent in tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, and has adopted a standard set by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which classifies inhaled diacetyl as a respiratory toxicant. This is not activist speculation. It is the conclusion of the world’s most rigorous drug and tobacco regulator.The lesson here is simple and should alarm every parent, teacher, and policymaker in Pakistan: a chemical being safe to eat tells you nothing about whether it is safe to inhale directly into your lungs, hundreds of times a day, for years. Vaping devices deliver exactly that kind of repeated, concentrated inhalation exposure — precisely the pattern that turned diacetyl from a harmless food additive into an occupational health catastrophe.And diacetyl is only one chemical among many used in vape flavourings whose long-term inhalation effects remain poorly understood. Young people in Pakistan are, in effect, unwitting participants in a live experiment, inhaling untested chemical cocktails sold to them as a fun, low-risk lifestyle choice.The nicotine embedded in these products compounds the danger. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known, and the developing adolescent brain is especially vulnerable to it — vaping nicotine at a young age measurably increases the likelihood of lifelong dependency and makes the transition to conventional cigarettes more, not less, likely.
The industry’s promise of “harm reduction” quietly collapses when the primary customers were never smokers to begin with.Pakistan cannot afford to repeat the regulatory mistakes made elsewhere, watching an entire generation grow addicted before evidence catches up with policy. What is needed now is urgent, coordinated action: a genuine ban on flavoured vape marketing aimed at youth, mandatory disclosure and testing of the chemical constituents in e-liquids sold locally, strict enforcement against sales to minors, and a sustained public health campaign that tells young people the truth their sleek advertisements will not: that what tastes sweet in your mouth can still be poison in your lungs.The choice in front of Pakistan is not between smoking and vaping. It is between protecting a generation and abandoning it to an industry that has already shown, through decades of documented harm, exactly how little it values the health of the people it sells to.
