Distinguished colleagues, members of the press,
Good morning, and a warm welcome to you all.
It is my privilege to welcome you to the launch of our latest report, New Smoke Trap: New and Emerging Nicotine and Tobacco Products, Youth Exposure and Policy Gaps in Nigeria. The study examines the rapid expansion of new-generation nicotine and tobacco products across Nigeria. It also interrogates the regulatory and public health implications of that expansion at a time when the country’s demographic profile makes it uniquely vulnerable to industry manipulation.
The products under examination include e-cigarettes commonly known as vapes, nicotine pouches, and heated tobacco products, all of which are now highly visible in supermarkets, embedded in nightlife environments, and aggressively promoted across digital platforms that are disproportionately accessed by young people, thereby normalising nicotine consumption within everyday youth culture.
For decades, global and national public health systems confronted a clearly identifiable adversary in the form of combustible cigarette, whose visible smoke, distinctive smell, and scientifically established harms provided the evidentiary foundation upon which the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) was negotiated and upon which countries, including Nigeria, constructed domestic regulatory regimes.
In our own context, the domestication of the FCTC through the National Tobacco Control Act 2015 and the National Tobacco Control Regulations 2019 represented a major public health achievement, introducing excise taxation, comprehensive advertising restrictions, smoke-free public spaces, graphic health warnings, and institutional enforcement mechanisms specifically designed to address tobacco leaf products whose modes of production, distribution, and harm were well understood.
That framework continues to serve a critical purpose, particularly with respect to traditional products like cigarettes. However, it was created to deal with one specific way of delivering nicotine through the burning of tobacco leaves. Because of that, the rules inevitably encounter strain when confronted with products that are engineered to sit at the margins of existing definitions.
As regulatory scrutiny intensified globally and social stigma around smoking deepened, the tobacco industry recalibrated its strategy by diversifying its portfolio and rebranding addiction as innovation, introducing what it now describes as reduced-harm or next-generation alternatives and presenting them not as extensions of a lethal corporate legacy but as sophisticated lifestyle accessories aligned with modernity, technological progress, and personal choice.
These devices are sleek in design, flavoured in ways that appeal to youth sensibilities, and marketed through youth-populated digital ecosystems. Yet beneath the aesthetics and rhetorical reframing lies the same addictive substance that has anchored tobacco profits for over a century. Nicotine remains the central commodity, and its neurobiological impact, particularly on adolescents and young adults, is well documented, which makes the strategic targeting of youthful populations not an incidental marketing decision but a structural feature of a profit model that depends on recruiting new users as older consumers succumb to disease and death.
Our report is therefore significant because it moves the discussion in Nigeria from speculation to documented evidence and situates our country squarely within this global transformation. Through structured field surveillance conducted in Lagos, Enugu, and the Federal Capital Territory, combined with systematic digital monitoring between October – December 2025, we documented 781 nicotine and tobacco-related products, of which 573 fall within the category of new and emerging nicotine and tobacco products (NENTPs).
E-cigarettes alone accounted for 522 documented items, illustrating both the scale of market penetration and the diversity of product variants available to consumers, while nicotine pouches, though less visible in physical retail environments, are proliferating rapidly online, and heated tobacco products, though presently niche, are clearly positioned for phased expansion as the industry consolidates its foothold.
What emerges from our evidence is not only a story of how the tobacco industry has diversified but also a revelation of the present regulatory asymmetry that leaves Nigeria vulnerable. Our existing tobacco control framework was constructed around combustible tobacco leaf products and does not adequately anticipate or address modern nicotine delivery systems, many of which are marketed as “tobacco-free” while still containing substantial quantities of nicotine.
In our monitoring, we documented numerous brands that advertise nicotine pouches as “free of tobacco” while emphasising that the nicotine is synthetic or laboratory-made, a framing designed to exploit definitional gaps in current regulations and to imply safety where none has been conclusively established.
Scientific consensus confirms that synthetic nicotine is pharmacologically identical in structure and effect to tobacco-derived nicotine. It is equally addictive, with the same capacity to bind to certain receptors in the brain, trigger dopamine release, and establish dependence. Moreover, laboratory-made nicotine poses equivalent dangers, particularly when consumed in high doses, as is typical in many of these emerging products. High-dose exposure amplifies risks, especially for adolescents and young adults whose developing brains are highly susceptible to nicotine’s neurotoxic effects, including disrupted prefrontal cortex development, impaired attention, learning deficits, heightened impulsivity, and increased vulnerability to lifelong addiction and other substance use.
Sadly, these products are frequently promoted through digital platforms with minimal age verification mechanisms, thereby lowering barriers to youth access in ways that conventional tobacco advertising no longer permits.
We have also observed the increasing assertiveness of industry-aligned actors who engage regulatory agencies with arguments that these products should be endorsed as cessation alternatives, frequently invoking the so-called Quit Like Sweden narrative to suggest that declining smoking rates in Sweden are attributable to widespread uptake of alternative nicotine products such as snus and that Nigeria should replicate this trajectory. This framing warrants careful scrutiny. Sweden’s remarkable decline in smoking prevalence now stands as a public health achievement; however, evidence from independent analyses, including those by the Swedish Public Health Agency, attributes this progress predominantly to sustained, comprehensive tobacco control policies implemented over decades. These include progressive tax increases on combustible tobacco, comprehensive bans on advertising and promotion, early adoption of smoke-free public environments, strict age restrictions, sales licensing requirements, graphic warnings, and robust cessation support, measures aligned with and often exceeding WHO FCTC standards.
Even if one were to assume, without conceding, that Sweden’s experience is reducible to the single factor of alternative products, the parallels with Nigeria collapse under examination. Demographic profiles, baseline tobacco use patterns, enforcement capacities, and existing policy landscapes differ profoundly. Most critically, our findings demonstrate that in Nigeria these emerging products are not primarily serving as bridges for entrenched adult smokers seeking to quit. Instead, they are being aggressively normalised among young people, many of whom have never previously smoked or engaged with nicotine in any form, thereby expanding the overall market for addiction rather than contracting it.
We therefore state unequivocally that the uncritical endorsement or permissive regulation of these products would jeopardise Nigeria’s hard-won gains in tobacco control and risk entrenching a new cycle of nicotine dependence among a generation that should be protected rather than targeted. Evidence from multiple jurisdictions demonstrates that strong regulatory action, including flavour restrictions, marketing controls, excise taxation, and in some cases outright bans on specific product categories such as disposable vapes, has been adopted precisely because policymakers recognise the speed with which youth uptake can escalate in the absence of firm oversight.
In light of our findings, we recommend that regulatory coverage be extended clearly and comprehensively to all nicotine products, irrespective of their form, that heated tobacco products be treated as tobacco products in alignment with global guidance given their reliance on tobacco sticks, and that emerging nicotine products be integrated into the excise tax framework to prevent price differentials from driving youth experimentation.
We further call on the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria, the Federal Ministry of Trade and Investment, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, and other relevant bodies to harmonise their approaches, because our research identified divergent institutional understandings of these products, with some agencies viewing them primarily as commodities subject to trade standards and others recognising their public health implications. Such fragmentation creates opportunities for regulatory arbitrage by industry actors.
The digital environment requires particular urgency, as it has become the industry’s most agile frontier, characterised by influencer marketing, algorithmic targeting, and cross-border promotion that outpaces traditional monitoring frameworks, and unless advertising and promotional loopholes are closed decisively, Nigeria will continue to witness the normalisation of nicotine consumption within online youth culture.
At the same time, public education must be revitalised so that Nigerians understand clearly what nicotine is, how addiction functions, and why the absence of smoke does not equate to the absence of harm. The future of tobacco control in Nigeria must be anchored in evidence, institutional coherence, and political courage, not in the marketing narratives of an industry whose commercial survival depends on expanding the pool of nicotine users.
We are deeply grateful to the members of the CAPPA Youth Vanguard and the CAPPA team whose fieldwork and research produced the data that grounds this report in lived reality. We acknowledge with appreciation our partner, Vital Strategies, for their invaluable support and contributions to the realisation of this study. Our extensive thanks also go to Professor Lekan Ayo-Yusuf of the Africa Centre for Tobacco Industry Monitoring and Policy Research (ATIM) for his scholarly review of this work.
To the members of the press present here today, your engagement is indispensable, because the translation of evidence into public understanding and policy action depends in large measure on rigorous, independent journalism that resists corporate framing and centres public health.
We thank you for your presence, and we invite you to engage critically with the findings of this report as Nigeria confronts a new phase in the struggle to protect its people, especially its youth, from the evolving architecture of nicotine addiction.
