Electronic cigarettes, or vapes, began popping up in shops across the country in about 2012. It was a wide-open market for the slick new nicotine-delivery devices, which arrived with zero regulation.
More than 10 years have passed, and the electronic cigarette market is still completely unregulated. The Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, which would change that, has been before Parliament since 2018.
University of Cape Town pulmonologist Richard van Zyl-Smit and his colleagues have spent the last three years documenting what years without regulation have meant for teens who have easy access to the devices, which come in more than 7 000 different flavours.
In December 2024, the researchers began rolling out the first results of a survey of 25 000 high school learners across all nine provinces: roughly 17 were vaping, and of those, 61 showed signs of addiction they couldnt get through a day without their device.
After years of dropping numbers of traditional cigarette smokers, the research was clear: a new generation of nicotine addicts was born. Van Zyl-Smit explains what happened.
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Somewhere around 2012, electronic cigarettes began popping up in shops across the country. It was a nicotine-infused Wild West: an open market for slick new delivery devices which arrived with a lot of hype and zero regulation. Apart from complying with import rules, there was no specific limit on advertising like with tobacco, no legal standard on what was used in making the product. Best of all, if you are in the tobacco and vape industry, you could sell it to anyone who asked, including minors.
More than 10 years have passed, and the electronic cigarette market continues to be unregulated, waiting for the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill which has been before Parliament since 2018 to be passed. Stalled in committee, it would ban the advertising of all tobacco products, including electronic devices such as e-cigarettes and vapes, tobacco product displays at points of sale, smoking in all public areas and the sale of single cigarettes. But it is anyones guess on how it will finally come out, when, and if, it does finally appear.
