There are questions a region can postpone for years without grasping the cost of postponement. The question of how regulatory architecture shapes citizens’ beliefs about nicotine —and, through them, the public health decisions of millions of adults— belongs to that family. On April 29, 2026, in the Palermo headquarters of the Escuela Superior de Economía y Administración de Empresas (ESEADE), a group of researchers and professionals convened by EcoNHealth Insights and Movimiento Pro-Vecino, A.C., with the support of Global Action to End Smoking, gathered to address it.
The opening was led by Fernando Briseño —head of the regional project driven by EcoNHealth Insights— and by Alfredo Blousson, director of ESEADE. The conceptual framework that would govern the entire day was established from the start: nicotine consumption is, beyond a public health problem, an economic problem of decision-making under imperfect information. Millions of people choose between products of vastly different risk profiles armed with incomplete data, distorted perceptions, and public messaging that frequently aggravates the very problem it claims to solve. Regulatory quality, viewed through that lens, ceases to be a question of prohibiting more or prohibiting less and becomes a more demanding question: how to inform well.
The Comparative Panel
The first session of country presentations brought together three perspectives on three profoundly divergent regulatory trajectories in Latin America. The economist José Antonio Márquez presented the Mexican case —that of a country that has elevated the prohibition of electronic nicotine systems to its very Constitution. Horacio Miguel Arana offered the Argentine landscape. Closing the first panel was Dr. José Ignacio Hernández, of the Faculty of Economics and Administration at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, with the Chilean experience.
After the break, Dr. José Manuel Heredia, a political scientist, resumed the conversation. The We Are Innovation address followed immediately afterward.
From 2117 to 2059: What Argentine Vapers Say
The We Are Innovation presentation focused on bringing to the table the voice that was still missing: that of Argentines who vape. The intervention articulated the findings of the national survey «Vaping in Argentina: Profiles, Habits, and Support for Regulation», conducted by Opinaia on a national sample of 1,500 cases with a margin of error of ±2.5%, alongside the position paper «From 2117 to 2059: How International Evidence Can Accelerate the End of Smoking in Argentina».
The title contains the two numbers that summarize the entire dilemma. If Argentina maintains its current policy, it will reach the smoke-free threshold —fewer than five percent prevalence— only in the year 2117. If it adopts an approach comparable to Sweden’s, that horizon shifts to 2059. The difference between the two scenarios: fifty-eight years. Fifty-eight years during which, according to data from the Argentine Ministry of Health and the Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (IECS), combustible cigarettes claim forty-five thousand Argentine lives every year. The arithmetic of the error is implacable.
The Argentine paradox can be stated without euphemism. The country sustains one of the most restrictive postures in the world —a total prohibition on electronic systems, prohibition on heated tobacco, regulatory limbo on nicotine pouches— and yet displays a smoking prevalence of 23% and ranks ninetieth on the Path to Smoke-Free Index. More restriction, worse outcome. And the users themselves perceive that contradiction with notable clarity.
Five percent of Argentines vape exclusively: nearly two million people, mostly between 25 and 44 years of age, who in their vast majority have left combustible cigarettes behind. The central political finding of the study is categorical: 53% support a normative framework with controls and standards —neither prohibition nor unrestricted market. 66% expressly demand quality and safety standards. 55% support effectively banning access to minors, which paradoxically does not happen today. And 41% began vaping precisely to quit smoking; 38%, to reduce their cigarette consumption.
This citizen perception aligns with the best available international scientific evidence. Public Health England’s 2015 systematic review established that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking combustible cigarettes —a figure that emerged not as a headline but as a technical conclusion drawn from evaluating the scientific literature then available. The range has since been sustained and deepened by two institutions of the highest sanitary rank in the United Kingdom: the Royal College of Physicians, which in its 2016 report «Nicotine without smoke: Tobacco harm reduction» ratified the conclusion and updated it in subsequent reviews; and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), the agency of the United Kingdom’s Department of Health and Social Care that succeeded Public Health England in 2021 and publishes annual evidence reviews on vaping. A decade of subsequent scientific literature has not refuted the original finding: it has confirmed it and, in several respects, refined it.
A Moral Paradox: Prohibition and Minors
Perhaps the most uncomfortable paradox the Argentine survey delivers is this. If the prevailing prohibition is justified —in good measure— by the imperative to protect minors, the data suggest that the current regime produces precisely the opposite effect.
46% of Argentine vapers perceive access to these products as «easy» or «very easy». 58% buy them through informal online channels —social media, marketplaces, individual sellers— without any effective age verification. 30% acquire them at kiosks, with no traceability or sanitary control. And these are, it bears repeating, formally prohibited products.
The consequence states itself without circumlocution: Argentina’s prohibitionist regime has not eliminated the market but has driven it into informality. In which of the two scenarios is a minor more likely to access an unfiltered product —in a pharmacy or licensed tobacconist with document verification, or in a private social media account? The question admits only one plausible answer. A regulated market, with formal age verification systems and effective sanctions for those who break the rule, protects minors better than a black market does. The prohibition that justified itself by protecting the youngest has ended, paradoxically, by exposing them.
The Documented Cost of Bad Regulation
Studying those who are getting it right is only half the lesson; the other half consists in studying those who are getting it wrong. Estonia restricted vaping flavors and produced a black market that today exceeds half of total consumption. In the Netherlands and Brazil, according to the global Ipsos survey commissioned by We Are Innovation and conducted in 2024 on 27,000 smokers across 28 countries, more than 80% of smokers mistakenly believe that vaping is as harmful as or more harmful than combustible cigarettes —the highest figure in the world. The mistaken perception blocks the transition to less harmful alternatives. The economic framework set out by EcoNHealth Insights at the start of the day had anticipated it with precision: when the public health information that reaches the consumer becomes distorted, someone ends up paying for that error with their health.
At the opposite extreme of the European map, Sweden is poised to become the first country in the European Union to cross the smoke-free threshold. Its smoking prevalence is 5.4%, its lung cancer mortality stands 36% below the European average, and since the mass introduction of nicotine pouches between 2015 and 2021, female combustible cigarette consumption fell by 46%, according to Eurobarometer 539 and Eurostat. The Czech Republic and Greece, starting from higher prevalences, also recorded accelerated declines after adopting frameworks that differentiate by relative risk.
Chile, on the other side of the Andes, offers the closest regional mirror —and, precisely for that reason, the most instructive, because it forces one to draw distinctions. Law 21,642, published in the Chilean Official Gazette on January 4, 2024, and fully in force since May 20, 2025, modifies Law 19,419 on tobacco control to incorporate Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) and Electronic Non-Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENNDS) into the Chilean regulatory framework. The norm prohibits sale to minors under 18 and within the hundred meters surrounding educational establishments, restricts advertising and use spaces, sets a maximum nicotine concentration of 45 mg/ml in vaping liquids, and mandates complete labeling: manufacturer, ingredients, concentration, instructions, and contraindications. A technical clarification, however, is owed by intellectual honesty. The Chilean law assimilates electronic devices to tobacco products under a single regulatory umbrella —the line recommended by the World Health Organization— rather than adopting the European model of differentiation by relative risk that the position paper of We Are Innovation proposes for Argentina. The conceptual distance between the two approaches is real. But so is the distance separating Chile from Argentina: Santiago, with all its limitations from a strict harm reduction perspective, has at least consolidated a regulated, traceable market with effective age verification. Buenos Aires, by contrast, continues to inhabit a prohibitionist regime that produces the effect opposite to the one it proposes.
Five Pillars for an Argentine Roadmap
The proposal brought to the panel —fully developed in the position paper of We Are Innovation— articulates around five pillars: quality and safety standards for innovative nicotine products; strict and verifiable age restrictions; differentiated fiscal policy according to relative risk; transparent, evidence-based information so that adults can decide with data; and equity in access to alternatives. This last pillar deserves particular emphasis. Smoking prevalence in Argentina’s first income quintile is 24.7%, against 20.3% in the fifth quintile. Prohibition is not socially neutral: it doubly punishes lower-income populations —first through their disproportionate exposure to combustible cigarettes, then through the impossibility of accessing the less harmful alternatives that a formal market would otherwise offer.
Civil Society and the Technical Closing
After the We Are Innovation address, the conversation shifted toward the voices of organized civil society. Marcela Madrazo, president of Procurando Salud Sin Fronteras, offered the Mexican reading from an organization that has publicly sustained, with notable persistence, the debate on the regulatory and sanitary cost of the constitutional prohibition currently in force in her country. The academic block was closed by Eneas Biglione, president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for the Americas. The question-and-answer session that followed allowed the five presentations to be linked under a single transversal question: what regulatory architecture allows adults to make informed decisions without the State turning information into an obstacle?
The technical closing of the day was reserved for the most distinctive component of the academic program. After lunch, Fernando Briseño presented the results of the causal experiment designed by EcoNHealth Insights to measure the effect of regulation on risk perceptions in Latin America. The project, which will deploy across Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, promises to establish the baseline on the economics of nicotine in the region. A final question-and-answer session led by Briseño and Márquez formally brought the meeting to a close.
The 1st International Meeting at ESEADE leaves a conclusion that exceeds Argentina and projects onto all of Latin America: the quality of harm reduction policies depends, ultimately, on the quality of information that circulates about products. Where information is transparent and rigorous, transition occurs. Where information becomes distorted —through prohibition, through ambiguity, through official misinformation— the combustible cigarette remains. And so do the people.
Argentinos, a las cosas
The We Are Innovation presentation closed with a phrase pronounced at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in 1939 by José Ortega y Gasset —the Madrilenian philosopher exiled by the Spanish Civil War— during a lecture later titled «Meditación del pueblo joven» (Meditation on the Young Nation). Four words: «Argentinos, a las cosas» —in English, Argentines, to the things themselves, an echo of Husserl’s phenomenological injunction.
It was not a harangue. It was, in the strictest sense, a philosophical invitation: to abandon the seduction of grandiloquent rhetoric and to attend to concrete problems —in his grammar, the facts, the structures, the very things that compose the life of a nation. Applied to the public health debate this gathering convened, the call acquires an uncomfortable currency. There are facts: forty-five thousand deaths each year from combustion in Argentina, two million adults who have already made the transition, a causal experiment underway that will confirm what the Argentine survey already suggests. And there is, facing those facts, a public policy that prefers speeches. Nearly ninety years later, Ortega’s call remains intact. And unanswered
Source: We Are Innovation
