Commercialization of vaping devices has always been technically illegal in Mexico.
Usage, however, has not been, and the growth of a relatively unregulated vaping market reached almost 1 million occasional or daily users in 2017, according to government sources.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the prohibition of vapes is unconstitutional; while vapers were cautiously optimistic that the decision would create a regulated vaping market, non-regulation has stubbornly prevailed.
At the end of May, we faced our latest blow: As the World Health Organization (WHO) has done in the past with vaping bans, it awarded President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) a prize on May 31, World No Smoking Day. The day after, AMLO enacted a decree on electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), adding the prohibition to “circulate” them in Mexico—a direct contradiction to the Supreme Court ruling.
It was his fifth relevant decree since he became president in 2018, yet another attempt to work his way around the courts and Congress to pursue a prohibitionist agenda. Though the press, especially in the United States, has framed this newest decree as a total ban on e-cigarette sales, the move is better understood as the latest in a series of efforts to strong-arm the Mexican government into prohibition instead of sensible regulation.
Roberto Sussman – Filter Mag – 2022-06-10.
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