Will the tobacco ban backfire?

The goal of a tobacco-free generation is not wrong. It is the method that requires deeper scrutiny. Sri Lanka has an opportunity to lead, not by copying a policy that has already been abandoned in the country that invented it, but by designing a comprehensive, systems-aware tobacco reduction strategy that addresses stocks and flows, that closes the doors to illicit trade before opening new ones, that funds cessation seriously, and that changes culture rather than simply changing the law 

The recent announcement that Sri Lanka’s National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol (NATA) has submitted a concept paper proposing to ban tobacco sales to everyone born after 2010 will, understandably, be welcomed by many. Tobacco kills. NATA’s chairman notes that around 22,000 Sri Lankans die every year from tobacco-related causes. The health case is undeniable. Nobody disputes that.

But good intentions, combined with incomplete thinking, have a habit of producing bad outcomes. Before Parliament moves on this proposal, Sri Lanka would benefit enormously from applying a discipline that the world’s most progressive policymakers are increasingly turning to, systems thinking. Our world is a complex, interconnected, ecological, social, and economic system, but often, we treat it as if it were not.

Banning cigarettes for an entire generation is the kind of intervention that looks clean on paper but complex in practice. History shows us why.

The iceberg beneath the policy

A social issue has visible and invisible layers. What we see - smoking rates, related deaths, healthcare and other economic costs - are the events at the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lie the patterns, the structures, and the mental models (made up of values, assumptions, beliefs) that drive those events. Effective policy must engage the whole iceberg, not just what floats above the waterline.

A generational ban addresses the visible tip - access - while leaving the deeper structures largely untouched: the economic desperation that makes cheap tobacco attractive, the social norms that make smoking feel like belonging, the nicotine dependency that makes quitting feel impossible, and the established criminal networks that stand ready to fill any legal vacuum.

Then there’s the ‘forbidden fruit’ effect. Researchers studying tobacco policy have noted, and tobacco companies have cynically exploited, the observation that restriction can make a product more attractive to young people. The very intervention intended to reduce a behaviour can, in certain populations, amplify it.

A generational ban will create a permanent class of people for whom cigarettes are illegal. For some, that will be an effective deterrent. For others, particularly the young, for whom risk is a feature, not a bug, it will make cigarettes more interesting, not less. This is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to do the right thing, and to support demand reduction with the seriousness it deserves.

This ban will be a classic ‘fix that fails’ trap. This is when a solution is applied to a symptom and appears to work initially, but produces delayed consequences that eventually make the original problem worse or create new problems. We do not need to theorise about whether this will happen. We have observed it.

What New Zealand learned - the hard way

New Zealand was the world’s pioneer of the generational tobacco ban model. In 2022, the country passed landmark legislation that banned tobacco sales to anyone born after January 2009 – one of the world’s most ambitious tobacco control laws ever enacted. 

The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars. The law was due to be implemented in July 2024.

By February 2024, the law was dead. A new coalition government repealed it. One of the central arguments used to justify the reversal was the risk of creating an illicit market. Researchers from the University of Otago condemned the repeal as lacking “evidence, logic and popular support.” They were probably right. But the political reality was that the policy had never been implemented and it was repealed before it could prove or disprove itself.

The New Zealand episode reveals an undeniable reality about generational bans: they are extraordinarily difficult to sustain across changes of government. A policy that takes decades to deliver results is vulnerable to being reversed in weeks. In systems language, the “time delay” between the policy’s enactment and its measurable benefits creates a window of political vulnerability that opponents can exploit.

Bhutan: The world’s most committed experiment

If we want to understand what a real tobacco ban looks like in practice, look not to the rich countries debating legislation, but to our neighbouring country, Bhutan. Bhutan banned the sale and distribution of tobacco in 2004, which was followed by the introduction of the Tobacco Control Act in 2010. If any country had the cultural, religious, and governmental conditions to make prohibition work, it was Bhutan.

The results were sobering. The ban drove retailers underground immediately, creating a thriving black market fed by smuggling from across the border from India. When Bhutan closed that border during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, black-market cigarette prices soared fourfold overnight - proof that demand had never actually disappeared, only moved. Most strikingly, according to the Global Youth Tobacco Survey, tobacco use among Bhutanese schoolchildren aged 13 to 15 actually increased, rising from 24% in 2006 to 30% in 2013, in the middle of the ban. By 2021, Bhutan had amended its own law to legalise domestic tobacco sales, bringing the market back above ground, marking a major policy shift.

South Africa: A master class in unintended consequences

The most dramatic real-world evidence, however, comes from South Africa. In March 2020, as part of its COVID-19 response, the South African government banned the sale of all tobacco products. The aim was to reduce smoking-related lung complications in pandemic patients.

Before the ban, roughly 35% of South Africa’s cigarette market was already illicit. Within weeks of the ban taking effect, 100% of the market became illicit. Every single cigarette sold in South Africa during those five months passed through criminal hands. Prices surged by over 240%. Consumers did not stop smoking; they simply stopped buying from legal sources and started buying from criminal networks.

When the ban was eventually lifted, those criminal networks did not simply fold up. Research found that smokers who had switched to illegal brands during the ban were 17 percentage points more likely to continue buying illegal brands three years later. The ban had permanently restructured the market in favour of illicit operators. By 2026, illicit products are estimated to make up approximately 75% of South Africa’s cigarette market. Consequently, the British American Tobacco Company in South Africa announced in January 2026 that it will close its only manufacturing facility in South Africa by the end of 2026. Furthermore, the illicit trade is estimated to cost the government between 15 - 40 billion South African Rand annually in lost tax revenue. 

The health problem was not solved. New problems were created.

Why Sri Lanka is especially vulnerable

Here is where the warning becomes most urgent for us. Sri Lanka is not starting from a clean slate. Even today, before any generational ban is in place, the Ceylon Tobacco Company’s 2024 annual report describes the illicit cigarette market as rapidly growing, with over a billion cigarette sticks entering the market in 2024 alone and illicit products estimated at 12% of the total market. 

Sri Lanka also has one of the highest cigarette prices in the world relative to purchasing power, making us a prime target for illicit trade. As I write this, I received the news alert of 18 Chinese and Sri Lankan passengers being arrested at the Bandaranaike International Airport for attempting to smuggle a stock of foreign-manufactured cigarettes valued at Rs. 31.38 million. Given that the maximum penalty for smuggling is just Rs. 1 million, the arithmetic of criminal incentives is already tilted dangerously against us. Layering a generational ban on top of this is not introducing a new deterrent - it is introducing a new revenue stream for existing criminal networks!

What can be done instead

I am not arguing that change is not needed or that it is not possible. I am arguing that the change needs to be targeted at the right place in a complex social system. 

Outright prohibition is a structural rule change, which is more powerful than a tax tweak, but less powerful and far less durable than shifting culture and values. The countries that have achieved sustained reductions in smoking - Sweden (the world’s first officially “smoke-free” country with fewer than 5% of the population smoking regularly), Iceland (6% cigarette smoking rate; the lowest rate in Europe), Norway (9% cigarette smoking rate) - have done so through a combination of approaches: sustained, well-funded public education campaigns; accessible and free cessation support; progressive taxation carefully designed to keep the price gap between legal and illicit products manageable; strict enforcement against illicit trade; and, crucially, treating addiction as a public health issue rather than a moral failing.

None of this is glamorous. None of it generates a headline like “Sri Lanka bans cigarettes for an entire generation.” But it works. And it keeps working across changes of government, because the changes happen in the deeper layers of the system - in behaviour, in culture, in the reduction of addiction - rather than only in the law.

The goal we share and the path we choose

The goal of a tobacco-free generation is not wrong. It is the method that requires deeper scrutiny.

Sri Lanka has an opportunity to lead, not by copying a policy that has already been abandoned in the country that invented it, but by designing a comprehensive, systems-aware tobacco reduction strategy that addresses stocks and flows, that closes the doors to illicit trade before opening new ones, that funds cessation seriously, and that changes culture rather than simply changing the law.

A tobacco-free generation is a worthy destination. But a road paved with prohibition does not lead there. It leads somewhere darker and more profitable for exactly the people we are trying to shut out. Good policy saves lives. Policy that overlooks systemic consequences can unintentionally strengthen the very forces it seeks to prevent. 

(The author is an academic at UNSW Canberra, Australia, specialising in systems thinking and its application to complex social problems. She has published research in international journals and presented at conferences globally)