Singapore’s firm stance on vaping has come under renewed scrutiny, following remarks made by Home Affairs and National Security Minister K. Shanmugam on 30 August, 2025. Speaking at a grassroots event, he criticised harm reduction arguments and linked pro-vaping advocates to tobacco industry interests.
The remarks were made in response to a statement issued by the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (Caphra), which called Singapore’s anti-vaping policies “regressive” and accused authorities of abandoning scientific evidence in favour of fearmongering.
Minister Shanmugam dismissed the arguments, comparing them to long-standing pro-drug legalisation rhetoric.
“These are the same old, tired arguments,” he said, claiming they are often made by organisations aligned with profit-driven interests such as tobacco companies.
Caphra, a New Zealand-based group, had challenged Singapore’s move to intensify enforcement against vaping following a spate of incidents involving vapes laced with the anaesthetic etomidate. The group warned that criminalising vaping could push it further underground, exacerbating public health risks.
Shanmugam pushed back forcefully, stating: “They say these electronic smoking devices are a safer alternative… this is a kind of snake oil these organisations peddle.” He added that Caphra acts as a lobbyist for Philip Morris International and accused them of avoiding acknowledgment of vaping’s own harms.
At a multi-ministry press conference on 28 August, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung had similarly warned that one vape pod can contain as much nicotine as four packs of cigarettes, reinforcing the narrative of health dangers.
Shanmugam further cited a United States study involving 16,000 youths, which found vape users were three times more likely to become smokers than their non-using peers.
He concluded that harm reduction was not an appropriate model for Singapore and referenced a New York Times article on U.S. cities reversing such policies after experiencing negative outcomes.
The paper he referred to appears to be part of a comprehensive umbrella review published in the journal Tobacco Control in August 2025. The review analysed 56 systematic reviews covering 384 individual studies and concluded that youth vaping was consistently associated with increased risks of later cigarette smoking, asthma, mental health problems, and other negative health outcomes.
It described the threefold increased likelihood of smoking initiation among youth who vape as a key and recurring pattern in the data.
However, experts involved in the review cautioned against overstating the findings. Ann McNeill, Professor of Tobacco Addiction at King’s College London, noted that many of the included studies were of “critically low or low quality”, and warned that “authors should be extremely cautious before making any conclusions”.
She added that underlying behavioural traits, such as impulsivity or sensation-seeking, may explain both vaping and smoking uptake, rather than vaping directly causing smoking.
Singapore outlawed the sale, possession, and use of e-vaporisers in 2018, under the Tobacco (Control of Advertisements and Sale) Act. The government cited concerns that vaping could act as a gateway to smoking, particularly among youth, and normalise nicotine consumption.
Authorities argued that allowing such products would undermine long-standing efforts to de-normalise tobacco use, even if the products themselves were marketed as less harmful.
However, the Singaporean government’s position stands in stark contrast to an extensive evidence review conducted by Public Health England (PHE), now under the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities.
The 2022 review, led by researchers at King’s College London, offered a systematic evaluation of the health risks of nicotine vaping.
The review concluded that vaping, while not risk-free, poses a “small fraction of the risks of smoking” in the short and medium term. It found significantly lower exposure to harmful substances among vapers compared to smokers, based on biomarker studies related to cancer and cardiovascular risks.
Importantly, it also noted that vaping remains the most commonly used aid for smoking cessation in England, with higher success rates in quit attempts when vaping products were involved, according to national health service data.
The review highlighted the critical need for accurate communication of relative harms, noting that only 34% of adults who smoke in the UK correctly believed vaping to be less harmful than smoking. It warned that misleading harm messaging could discourage smokers from switching to safer alternatives, thereby undermining public health goals.
In contrast, Shanmugam warned against being “colonised in our mind” by foreign narratives, asserting that Singapore’s approach has proven effective in keeping serious crime and drug use low. He maintained that any form of vaping regulation framed as harm reduction was tantamount to yielding to tobacco lobbyists.
Yet, the UK report explicitly cautioned against such absolutist perspectives. It recognised the low prevalence of vaping among never-smokers, both adults and youth, and reported no significant increase in harmful biomarkers among non-vapers exposed to second-hand vape in short-term conditions.
While acknowledging the need for further long-term studies, PHE’s report reinforced that e-cigarettes are substantially less harmful than combustible tobacco and could be a pragmatic part of tobacco control strategies.
Caphra’s executive coordinator, Nancy Loucas, reiterated this view, stating that Singapore’s blanket criminalisation “flies in the face of successful harm reduction strategies that have transformed public health outcomes worldwide.”
Despite such international evidence, Singapore remains one of the strictest jurisdictions on vaping, having banned its sale and use since 2018. Authorities argue that preventing initiation and deterring illicit trade justify the zero-tolerance stance.
But critics caution that conflating regulated nicotine vaping with drug-laced products may obscure the nuanced scientific consensus emerging globally.
Read the 1,468-page detailed report by Public Health England, published online, to scrutinise the full body of evidence and conclusions drawn by independent health researchers.
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