OMG I feel sorry for Tobacco Control

I’ve had a complicated relationship with tobacco control, if I’m being honest, it’s been a hate/hate one for the better part of a decade. In the beginning, I genuinely thought we were aligned. I believed that if the goal was to reduce harm, then of course they would embrace alternatives like vaping. I was wrong.

Over the years, that disagreement turned personal. I’ve been the subject of attacks on my character, “exposés” about my work, screen shots of our website made into reports, and ongoing attempts to discredit me. One academic even suggested I named my business “Flavourium” to target children, while, ironically, not even bothering to get my name right. If you can’t say Papaioannoy, you probably don’t know much about me.

At times, it’s crossed into something more unsettling. During Vape Tour 2022, I had reason to believe we were being followed, people showing up, asking pointed questions about funding, taking photos, and attacking vaping. I’ve been told, credibly, that someone even tried to convince regulators I wasn’t a real person at all, that I was some kind of industry fabrication. An avatar so to say.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so persistent. The level of hostility is hard to ignore, and even harder to understand. So I don’t bother.

To be fair, and I think this matters, I haven’t always taken the high road either. I’ve mocked them, filed complaints, tried to land a nickname that would stick (who remembers Triad of Trouble), and yes, I’ve played a few mind games along the way, my music video was one for the books! I’ve sent “good luck” texts before their press conferences, emailed when we happened to be in the same city (never the same event) to suggest coffee, even shown up at their events uninvited. I’m not proud of all of it, but I’ll own it, that streak of pettiness, that impulse to poke back. And yet, something shifted at the last press conference. For the first time, they didn’t feel like caricatures or opponents. They felt human. And now that I’ve seen that, I can’t unsee it.

Flory Doucas,. long cast as the reigning princess of tobacco control in Quebec, seemed to lose a bit of her sparkle last Friday. The confidence in her voice flickered, like even she wasn’t fully buying the script. Cynthia Callard, the grand dame of the movement, sounded, tired. Less commanding, more resigned. Les Hagen was still very much himself, though the bravado felt dialed down a notch. And then there’s the new face, Dr. Mir. Maybe it’s just me, but there was an energy there that felt less like authority and more like he was hoping that no one called him out on his “facts”.

They summoned us there to unpack a headline grabbing claim that “50,000 youth started vaping” since the Minister took office, and to showcase a taxpayer-funded bus shelter campaign in Ottawa built around it. Shelter ads, pushing a story that doesn’t quite stand up. But the real takeaway wasn’t the number. It was the pivot.

Because beneath the talking points, the shift was obvious: away from smoking, the issue that still kills roughly 100 Canadians a day, and toward a far broader, more abstract goal: a “nicotine-free Canada.”

And that’s where the tension sits. Even for those deeply aligned with global frameworks like the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, there’s an unspoken reality here. The primary harm isn’t nicotine itself, it’s how it’s delivered. Combustion is the problem. Smoke is the problem. Flattening that distinction doesn’t clarify the issue, it blurs it.

Maybe that’s what we were actually seeing play out: a moment where the message is starting to outrun the evidence. Where even the people delivering it seem just a beat out of sync with what they know to be true.

From where I stand, I didn’t see conviction or strength in any of their arguments. When you took away the drama and theatrics, we saw a very thin argument, that was relying on their past, and relying on no one double checking. They leaned heavily on big, attention grabbing numbers that don’t hold up to scrutiny, pointed to widespread non-compliance as proof more rules are needed (instead of acknowledging enforcement failures), and cited “evidence” from other jurisdictions without accounting for the obvious shift to online and illicit markets. At the same time, they blurred critical distinctions, treating all nicotine products as equally harmful, while quietly pivoting toward an unrealistic goal of a “nicotine-free Canada.” When your case relies on inflated projections, selective data, and solutions that ignore how people actually behave, it doesn’t signal urgency it signals weakness.

And sadly, that is my flaw, my character flaw, I feel sorry for people who who act desperate. I can’t feel sorry fro them, none of us can, because what they are doing with their disinformation is literally encouraging people to smoke. They have lost their way, because they didn’t get their way with a federal flavour ban in 2021.

Perhaps the question they should be asking is why, and that answer is simple, because flavours work, and this whole “nicotine free Canada” is a pipe dream that I am not willing to stake the lives of people who want to use nicotine on. Safer options are out there in the world, and regulations need to encourage the innovation of safer products, not the elimination of them.