The worst idea in the history of tobacco control

The island nation of Palau and its backers are trying to have nicotine scheduled as a prohibited drug under the international illegal drug regime. What is going on?

Introduction

On 10 June 2026, the Republic of Palau, a Pacific Island nation, notified the United Nations Secretary-General under Article 2 of the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances (“the Convention”). This initiates a critical review by WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD), which makes a recommendation that is considered by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), a committee of 53 governments under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Council. The CND votes, and a two-thirds majority is required for a scheduling decision.

This is the process by which new substances are added to the schedules of one of the main international treaties prohibiting and regulating psychoactive drugs considered to be dependence-forming and harmful to public health.

The plucky Island state has set up a website to explain its initiative: Nicotine Review.

Giants of the drug policy field are not impressed.

Ethan Nadelmann, founder and former director of the Drug Policy Alliance in the United States, said the initiative “may well be one of the most foolish in modern or even ancient history.”

Tiny Pacific Nation Applies for Global Nicotine Ban. Who’s Behind It?, Filter, 24 June 2026

… and neither am I. So I thought it would be useful to say why.

• Part I will cover the likely intended approach.

• Part II will cover why it is wrong to do this.

• Part III will offer views on what is going on and how it should end.

Some terminology

There are three main U.N. drug conventions:

• 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs - covers drugs like heroin, cocaine, and cannabis, and consolidates a range of earlier treaties.

• 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances - covers drugs in chemical form like amphetamines, ecstasy and LSD, and medicines capable of abuse, like benzodiazepines.

• 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances - covers control of illicit trade and precursors to scheduled drugs.

Key bodies in this discussion:

• The WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) provides expert scientific and public health advice to inform drug scheduling decisions.

• The Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) makes decisions on scheduling and the scope of control of substances under the three drug conventions, based on scientific advice. The advice is provided by the ECDD.

• The International Narcotics Control Board is the independent and quasi-judicial monitoring body for the implementation of the U.N. drug conventions.

Part I: The likely intended approach

First, we have to clarify the likely intent of the proponents of adding nicotine to global drug prohibition (Palau and its backers).

Nicotine prohibition

The 1971 Convention is used to prohibit psychotropic substances by adding them to one of four schedules to the Convention (Schedules I-IV). The schedules in the 1971 Convention differ only in whether they allow scientific and medical exceptions and in how stringently those exceptions are defined and controlled. The 1971 Convention also controls medications that are open to abuse; for example, most benzodiazepines are listed in Schedule IV. The Convention establishes criteria for scheduling in Article 4.2 (discussed below), including potential for dependence, abuse liability, public health and social harms, therapeutic applications, and a proportionality test.

For consumer nicotine products, scheduling would amount to a global prohibition, with exceptions for medical products, such as NRT. We might also anticipate an exception for nicotine products where they are used for explicitly medical purposes under medical supervision, for example, offered on prescription to people who smoke for smoking cessation purposes only - essentially, the current Australian model.

Generally, the exemptions that would apply to NRT would default to prescription-only availability. However, it is possible to maintain over-the-counter availability using language in Article 3.2 and 3.3 of the 1971 Convention (preparations) or Article 9.3 (exemptions from prescriptions).

There have been no previous referrals of nicotine or tobacco.

Excluding tobacco products

The 1971 Convention regulates designated molecules, not products. Many have assumed that this would cover all recreational nicotine products, including cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco and so on. I think this is incorrect. The 1971 Convention generally regulates molecules, but not plants. The 1971 Convention regulates the psychoactive molecules, but not the plants from which they are derived:

• Cathinone and cathine are scheduled, but not the chewable Khat leaf from which these alkaloids are derived.

• Psilocybin is scheduled, but not magic mushrooms (though these mushrooms are banned in many jurisdictions, including the UK)

• The chemical DMT (dimethyltryptamine), but not Ayahuasca (a brew of plant stalks and roots) or the plants themselves.

• Mescaline is scheduled, but not the peyote cactus from which it is derived.

What about cannabis? The ban on cannabis does cover the plant. However, cannabis, cocaine and heroin are covered by an earlier convention, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961. The scope of the 1961 Convention does include opium poppy, straw and resin, the coca leaf, and the cannabis plant. But Palau uses the 1971 Convention, which only regulates the active ingredients in their isolated chemical form.

The proponents’ argument for excluding tobacco products would likely be fivefold:

1. Above all, an attempt to control tobacco using the 1961 or 1971 Conventions would crash and burn, as no one would expect most countries to sign up to making one billion tobacco users and the related tobacco supply chains illegal (think India, China, Europe, United States).

2. Tobacco can be excluded with reasonable coherence by using the molecule-not-plant approach of the 1971 Convention.

3. It can be argued that tobacco is covered by a specialised treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and that the regulatory gap concerns the control of nicotine in extracted or synthetic chemical form, which falls outside the FCTC's scope.

4. This type of nicotine prohibition is already an established policy in about 40 countries for vapes - including in India, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Turkiye. So Palau and its backers can argue that a substantial number of governments already do this, and therefore it cannot be entirely crazy. They would have a potentially supportive bloc already established, and the Palau initiative would be seen as an endorsement of national bans.

5. Exceptions could be made for existing medicines (NRT) and possibly medically supervised use of vapes and pouches for smoking cessation (the Australian model).

In summary, I believe the intention here is to schedule nicotine only when extracted from tobacco or in its synthetic form (i.e., as used in vapes, pouches, inhalers, etc.), but not in tobacco, and to exempt medical uses of nicotine.

So this initiative is pitched solely at the non-tobacco, non-combustible forms of nicotine - and therefore constitutes a frontal attack on the idea of tobacco harm reduction.

Control of illicit trade - the war-on-drugs treaty

A further U.N. drug convention would become automatically applicable if nicotine is scheduled under the 1971 Convention. This is the U.N. Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988. The purpose is stated in Article 2 as follows:

The purpose of this Convention is to promote co-operation among the Parties so that they may address more effectively the various aspects of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances having an international dimension.

Given that Euromonitor estimates “Over 75% of global e-vapour volume is driven by illicit market”, scheduling proponents will argue that the full force of the war on drugs should now apply to vapes and that pouches are sure to follow.

Note that illicit trade in tobacco products is included in the FCTC and developed in the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products.

The other way to address illicit trade, beyond enforcement, is to tackle the underlying drivers: prohibition, regulation and taxation. Note that when a substance is scheduled under the 1971 Convention, regulation and taxation become impossible, except in the narrowly defined exceptions for “medical and scientific” uses.

Denormalisation is the aim, and the process is the point

I doubt that this initiative will succeed in scheduling nicotine as a psychotropic substance under the 1971 Convention. However, worldwide prohibition and medicalisation may be only at the far extreme of the scheduling proponents’ aims. More likely, the objective here is “denormalisation” of nicotine (the substance), not smoking (the primary cause of disease). To that end, the process is the point.

The idea will be to generate a flow of evidence-gathering, discussion, reports, meetings, submissions, declarations, and side meetings at the FCTC COP-12. The process, it is doubtless hoped, will work for its advocates through a form of anchoring bias: the idea that the right and most pressing question to ask about nicotine is whether to ban it, and a process with serious people and gravity is now considering this important matter. Other than Palau’s government, no one else has been required to agree that this is a worthwhile matter for discussion and an international process.

It’s a little like setting up an international commission to determine whether the CIA was behind 9/11, whether 5G networks spread COVID, or whether Elvis is alive and well but living on the Moon. A process to address a question lends weight to its validity.

The Nicotine Review website is candid about how the process is the point:

Even if the CND does not vote to schedule nicotine, or defers a decision, significant value is created. The ECDD’s independent scientific assessment will be on the public record, the first such assessment under the UN system. That assessment will directly inform FCTC deliberations, including COP12 negotiations on Article 5.2(b), and will strengthen the basis for a renewed scheduling attempt at a future CND session. The moment a notification is filed, nicotine molecule governance is permanently on the international agenda.

This is anti-nicotine advocacy, not responsible control of dangerous drugs.

The process

At no expense to itself or its backers, Palau’s initiative will trigger a process of evidence-gathering by a WHO secretariat, circulation of a member state questionnaire, consideration by the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence, and, possibly, a vote by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which decides on scheduling on behalf of the U.N. and parties to the Convention.

Three key process documents are:

• UNODC, Scheduling procedures under the international drug control conventions, 2020. This summary document sets out the full process from referral to scheduling by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND). More information, e-learning, and a short video are available here.

• WHO, Guidance on the WHO review of psychoactive substances for international control, 2010. This sets out the procedures of the Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD). “The WHO Guidance”.

• WHO, Regulations for Expert Advisory Panels and Committees, 1982 (and amended). Experts are drawn from a standing roster of qualified experts and appointed for each meeting and report by the WHO Director General.

Pre-review. Because this has emerged as a request of a nation-state party to the Convention, there is no “pre-review”, the purpose of which would be “to determine whether current information justifies an Expert Committee critical review”. So the effort and expense of the Parties, WHO, ECDD members, and third parties in creating a full critical review are baked in, irrespective of the merits of the idea.

Consultation. The ECDD Secretariat is charged with data gathering and organising consultations and meetings. It issues a questionnaire to request information from parties and international drug control bodies.

Draft report. The ECCD Secretariat prepares the critical review document, which “should be as thorough as possible, and balanced in its presentation. It should include adequate and relevant data, including medical literature and abuse studies” (paragraph 22 in the WHO Guidance). The ECDD Secretariat provides the ECDD committee with a draft report, including data and analysis, under the 19 headings specified in paragraph 23, “where feasible”.

23. When preparing the draft critical review document, including a separate report on the questionnaire, the Secretariat should include, where feasible, information under the following headings:

1. substance identification […]

2. chemistry, including general information on synthesis, preparation and properties;

3. ease of convertibility into controlled substances;

4. general pharmacology, including pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics;

5. toxicology,

6. adverse reactions in humans;

7. dependence potential;

8. abuse potential;

9. therapeutic applications, extent of therapeutic use and epidemiology of medical use;

10. listing on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines;

11. marketing authorizations (as a medicine);

12. industrial use;

13. non-medical use, abuse and dependence;

14. nature and magnitude of public health problems related to abuse and dependence;

15. licit production, consumption and international trade;

16. illicit manufacture and traffic, and related information;

17. current international controls and their impact;

18. current and past national controls;

19. other medical and scientific matters relevant for a recommendation on the scheduling of the substance.

Good luck with that! To some, that would be more than a lifetime’s work.

The Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) decides. The WHO (ECDD) provides the critical report and makes a scheduling recommendation based on the scientific and medical criteria (dependence, abuse, public health and social harms, and therapeutic usefulness -see below). But the CND is required only to take WHO's views into account and may apply broader criteria: economic, social, legal, administrative, and other factors it deems relevant.

5. The Commission, taking into account the communication from the World Health Organization, whose assessments shall be determinative as to medical and scientific matters, and bearing in mind the economic, social, legal, administrative and other factors it may consider relevant, may add the substance to Schedule I, II, III or IV. The Commission may seek further information from the World Health Organization or from other appropriate sources.

Article 2.5 1971 Convention.

The CND defers to the ECDD on scientific and medical matters, but it is required to take wider policy concerns into account (for example, the wide range of unintended consequences that would likely arise from a scheduling decision. The CND is not bound by the ECDD, though it would be difficult for the CND to proceed if WHO advised against scheduling on scientific and medical graouns.

The timetable

The proponents hope to have a decision made by the CND in March 2028, according to an article in Nature. This would be the 71st session of the CND [meetings]. That is an ambitious timetable given what is involved.

This would mean the ECDD considering a draft report in 2027 (the 50th annual meeting will be in October 2027). I don’t believe that the necessary preparatory work, including evidence gathering by the Secretariat and comments from Parties, could be completed by October 2026 (with papers circulated 30 days in advance).

Normally, the ECDD annual report is published in April following the preceding October meeting. To meet the March 2028 timetable for CND consideration, the ECDD would need to transmit its report and recommendation shortly after the October meeting. The secretariat of the CND then has to prepare a note and also give the Parties the opportunity to comment and provide input.

I think all this is unlikely by March 2028. However, the CND does typically reconvene its March annual meeting in December each year, so that may be a possibility. But as we have seen above, the proponents of this initiative will be quite happy to keep this on the agenda indefinitely - the process is the point.

Expert Committee recommendation and CND decision

WHO forwards its analysis and recommendations to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, a functional commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. If the ECDD has decided against scheduling, the proposal is effectively dead. However, the ECDD can recommend monitoring and surveillance.

The 53-member Commission is responsible for deciding whether to schedule recommended substances. So it has two options.

1. Schedule under the 1971 Convention, and which of the four schedules to use

2. No scheduling, and the initiative ends there.

Part 2: What is wrong with this idea?

Blatant absurdity

The proposal would prohibit consumer nicotine products in their safest, most controlled forms, while allowing nicotine in the form that kills around 7 million people per year (in smoked form) to persist as the main legal alternative and to remain available pervasively. Why would anyone try to confine the lawful availability of a common drug to the form that does the greatest harm, while banning the far safer options? That is the essence of this proposal.

The scheduling idea should fail on cursory examination, and the initiative should be stopped before more time and money are wasted. Ideally, the U.N. Secretary-General should have a quiet word with the leadership of Palau.

A more obvious alternative: amend the FCTC

If the international community wishes to develop an international control regime for nicotine, it may amend the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (Part X, Articles 28 and 29) to bring legal forms of nicotine (other than tobacco) into a proportionately risk-based policy framework. It would be impossible to create a rational, risk-based framework from two conventions that have entirely different modalities:

• 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control: legal consumer products, tax, regulation, information, co-operation.

• 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances: broad prohibition, exemptions for scientific and medical use, tackling illicit trade.

Given that different nicotine products function as substitutes, a coherent regime would apply a similar framework to all forms, differentiated by risk. The fact that the Parties to the FCTC have yet to do so indicates how vexed the conflicts within the FCTC have been. These conflicts cannot be addressed by exporting them to another Convention.

Paradigm error: use for smoking cessation

Scheduling proponents may argue that these nicotine products could have value as smoking cessation aids (as if they are a form of non-medical NRT), and therefore could be made available under medical supervision as an exemption to the general prohibition.

That is the medical model adopted in Australia. The first and most obvious problem is that Australia’s model has failed completely. Australia’s Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Commission (ITEC) put the illicit market share of vapes at 95.7% (Annual report 2024-25 Table 4). The official medicalised route is rarely used because it fails to meet users' needs regarding product choice and accessibility.

The problem has arisen because much of the tobacco control community has tried to force these newer products (vapes, pouches, heated tobacco) into a treatment paradigm, almost as if they exist only to help people stop smoking. That is their preference and what they feel comfortable with, but also their strategic misunderstanding.

In reality, these products are used by consumers as an alternative way to consume the moderate psychoactive substance nicotine, but without having to inhale thousands of products of combustion arising from burning tobacco. In this consumer paradigm, these are safer nicotine products with numerous preferable characteristics. The effect of these new consumer products has been to steadily displace smoking (either through switching among current users or diversion at initiation among new users). However, they are not performing this function in the same way as nicotine replacement therapy, which is used to attenuate craving and withdrawal while the user pursues a path to nicotine abstinence. Safer nicotine products can be used in this way, but that is not the dominant paradigm.

People who vape generally wish to use nicotine in the same way that people wish to use other substances (alcohol, caffeine, cannabinoids), not as a cure for something worse, but as an experience in its own right. There is a fair concern about dependence, but this concern should diminish greatly if there is far lower net additional harm - for example, nicotine use by vaping or pouch use likely has 1-2 orders of magnitude lower risk than smoking. The main concern about nicotine dependence arises from smoking and continued use despite the related cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory harms.

Once people have switched to one of the novel products, they can still pursue nicotine abstinence, but have already reduced their health risk to a small fraction of that faced by people who continue to smoke.

Finally, the concept of using healthcare resources to provide stop-smoking services or NRT is far from globally universal. In many countries, there would be no healthcare system provision for smoking cessation. These products offer a market-based option that does not draw on public funds and capacity to reduce smoking.

Harming youth

Some will claim that scheduling newer nicotine products will protect youth. The reverse is true. It will deny them harm reduction options and bring them into contact with criminal networks.

The harm reduction approach for nicotine works via two main mechanisms:

• Stock: members of the existing population of nicotine users switch from a high-risk to a low-risk nicotine product - for example, from cigarettes to vapes.

• Flow: young people who take up nicotine use adopt a safer nicotine product (like vapes or pouches) instead of taking up smoking. For these young people, there is a substantial public health benefit. In most countries, the migration to safer forms of nicotine use has started with young people who would otherwise now be smoking.

Yes, there may be young people who would otherwise never have used nicotine, but take up nicotine use via a safer product (perhaps because it is less aversive and anti-social than smoking). For them, there is a net additional detriment, but this is small given the low-risk alternative and likely transient, given they did not have a high propensity to use nicotine (or they would have smoked in the counterfactual).

As with all substances and risk behaviours, a fraction of young people will take up nicotine use whether authorities approve or not. We can reduce the harm they experience by shaping their knowledge and incentives to use safer and legal products.

Prohibiting safer nicotine or making it available legally only to people who already smoke will adversely disrupt the processes of harm reduction described above. These are proceeding at the initiative of consumers, in their own interests and at their own expense; it would be wholly unethical to intervene to obstruct that process.

Expansion of illicit markets also harms young people by exposing them to unregulated products, other illicit goods and services, and criminal operatives, often drawing them into the lower tiers of the illicit supply chain.

Fails to meet the scheduling criteria

I probably should have started with the official criteria for scheduling a substance, but I think it is important to take the 30,000-foot view to start with.

The criteria for scheduling under the 1971 Convention are described in Article 2(4). The text is shown below, with my summary annotations in red:

1. Dependence: Nicotine use can meet this condition, depending on the method of delivery.

2. Abuse and ill-effects: Nicotine itself does not cause hallucinations, impairment, or oblivion, or induce harmful mood changes, such as violence, heightened anxiety, or panic. On the contrary, most people experience nicotine use as pleasurable, stimulating, anxiolytic, or cognitively enhancing - though some of that may be relief from withdrawal. Over a billion people use nicotine routinely, and high proportions of whole societies use the drug (today and in the past) without pronounced adverse effects from the drug itself. The harm arises from how it is delivered - primarily through tobacco smoke inhalation. The dependence becomes an abuse when users find it hard to stop despite significant net additional harm arising from the method of delivery, primarily smoking. But that case is far weaker with non-combustion products.

3. Public health and social problem: most of the harms from nicotine use arise from consumption by smoking tobacco, and this would be excluded from this control regime. Yet, it is the products likely to be controlled by scheduling that form the basis of a harm-reducing response to smoking. So scheduling would likely have three main effects:

   • Adverse behaviour change. Close off the beneficial consumer choice of accessing lawfully available nicotine products that are far safer than the globally dominant product, cigarettes, thereby worsening the public health problem. Users may take up smoking, stick with smoking, or relapse to smoking. They may consider other substances.

   • Illicit trade. Create an even larger international illicit trade in unregulated nicotine products of unknown safety, quality, age, and provenance, thereby nourishing the social problem of organised crime and creating new pubic health and consumer protection risks associated with unregulated markets. Euromonitor estimates global illicit trade in e-vapour and liquids at US$47 billion (2025). This would likely expand through prohibition and continued migration of nicotine use to safer products, only available illegally.

   • Risky workarounds. Encourage users or suppliers to try workarounds, such as mixing their own e-liquids or trading in high-strength toxic nicotine concentrates with up to 99% purity (most consumer products use liquids with concentrations below 5%). It may trigger the use of nicotine analogues or substances with similar properties.

4. Therapeutic usefulness: Nicotine Replacement Therapy is, of course, useful as a method of stopping smoking. It is widely available, including over the counter, and should remain so. But the value of vapes and pouches is that they displace smoking as a consumer-driven behaviour, not a therapeutic treatment under medical supervision; something many users would reject. The safer products should be available everywhere cigarettes are sold: supermarkets, corner shops, petrol stations, bars, etc., not just medical practices. There are no circumstances in which a consumer should be offered only the most harmful options for the use of nicotine. These products should be available to young people who would otherwise take up smoking.

Embedded in the language above, there is also a proportionality test: “warranting the placing of the substance under international control”. In other words, the public health and social problems have to be of sufficient scale and gravity to justify a broad international prohibition. It is hard to see how this test will be met: if there are public health problems associated with nicotine use, they are associated primarily with smoking or traditional smokeless recipes (Gutkha, Paan, etc) that contain high levels of carcinogens. These would fall outside the scope of a scheduling decision and remain largely uncontrolled in much of the world. Paradoxically, the products proposed for scheduling are those that offer a low-risk alternative to those that cause the greatest harm.

Proponents of scheduling will argue that the health impact of nicotine should be compared to a hypothetical world in which no one uses nicotine. Policymakers, however, should not do this: they should compare the world as it is with and without a scheduling decision. It is difficult to conceive of any circumstances in which scheduling would not worsen public health and exacerbate social problems.

Extending the war on drugs - to 1 billion people

I don’t want to rehearse the arguments for and against drug prohibition in general here, but there are many reasons to be sceptical. I recommend reading some of the reports from the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a grouping of high-level political figures, including former heads of government, with an overall vision of moving from drug prohibition to legal regulation. This proposal would move in the opposite direction.

A prohibition of nicotine would affect 129 million current vapers and an unknown but rapidly growing number of nicotine pouch users. It would also affect the migration of a market of around 1.2 billion tobacco users who are steadily shifting to safer products that would no longer be available lawfully.

That could create a colossal illicit market, in which the main harms would arise from the criminal infrastructure behind it and the drain on law enforcement necessary to control it. Hundreds of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens would be criminalised, and thousands of honest traders forced to close or become illicit suppliers.

Part III: What is going on?

I am going to state my assumptions based on what I know of this sort of activism and this situation. Of course, it is difficult to know, because the initiative has wrapped itself in the garb of a national initiative, which is its least likely origin.

Poor process and bad actors

The Republic of Palau has abused its position as a nation-state and allowed itself to be used as a flag of convenience for an unaccountable NGO-based, philanthropy-backed campaign initiative. In doing so, it will draw down resources from the WHO and UNODC at a time of significant financial, personnel, and reputational strain on the multilateral system. It will require member-state officials to engage with the process and address questions. It will worry users and threaten small businesses. And it will fail.

Neither Palau’s own population of 18,000 nor its leaders will bear the costs or opportunity costs arising from this. For the leaders, it offers a global opportunity for virtue signalling. For the shady backers and ideologues behind the initiative, it is a way to advance their pointless and destructive war on nicotine

Tobacco control dishonesty is already off the scale

If the European Network on Smoking Prevention is anything to go by, we can expect astonishing levels of dishonesty. Take its press announcement:

Except that these deaths are primarily caused by tobacco smoking and use of traditional smokeless tobacco products, not the nicotine molecule. These products have been regulated for about 60 years, and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is dedicated to regulating them. The use of the 1971 Convention (and practical politics) makes it highly unlikely that this initiative would apply to tobacco, and the ENSP’s press release half acknowledges that:

Palau’s initiative is designed to complement, not replace, existing global tobacco control efforts. The international tobacco control treaty has delivered historic gains but does not extend to nicotine as a molecule across all its current and future delivery forms. Scheduling nicotine under the 1971 Convention would add a molecule-based layer of control alongside existing product-based regulation, and is in line with FCTC Article 2.1 on Forward-Looking Measures “to better protect human health”.

Of course, what they say here is impossible. It is not possible to include tobacco products in a drug prohibition convention “alongside” the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The former would ban the product; the latter provides a framework for the regulation of a lawful product. The intention here is only to schedule nicotine when it is not bound into the tobacco leaf - i.e. when used in vapes and pouches.

So the combustible tobacco that causes the 7 million deaths mentioned in the ENSP headline will not be covered by this initiative and will remain legally and pervasively available. However, the non-combustible, non-tobacco nicotine that can slow and eventually stop the death and disease will be controlled under the 1971 Convention and banned. Nice job, tobacco control!

We can’t even attribute this to incompetence. The Science Director of ENSP, Dr Charis Girvalaki, is listed as an expert adviser to the Palau initiative. It has to be deliberate.

Big Tobacco’s little helpers

The initiative will doubtless win uncritical applause and be presented as Small Nation versus Big Tobacco - even though it has the effect of protecting and legitimising the cigarette trade by suppressing a much more competitive and diverse market in alternatives to cigarettes.

I should say that I do not believe that international tobacco companies want this sort of help or welcome its consequences. On the whole, they would like to compete in a market that is migrating towards safer products - because that is where the nicotine user is heading (and would move faster, were it not for Bloomberg-funded activism). It may be a helping hand for the unreconstructed national cigarette companies that remain state-owned or parastatal, but that would be assisting some of the worst corporations on earth.

Palau is a poster child for tobacco control failure

Palau wants to ban safer nicotine products but leave tobacco products untouched by the drug prohibition. You might think that Palau had already beaten the tobacco challenge and was now calling for international reinforcements to tackle what remains.

Not so… according to the Tobacco Atlas, it has a high level of tobacco use, notably gutkha, drawing unusually harsh words from the Atlas editors:

It has, of course, banned e-cigarettes, so there is that.

Undeclared interests and actors

The initiative lacks any real transparency; academics and activists have been engaged to do the dirty work, briefings have been published, and a well-crafted website has been created. No doubt there will be meetings, travel, consultants, support for expert input, and platforms for promoting the initiative. Yet there is no candid disclosure of who or what is behind this initiative, or how much money has been exchanged and what quid pro quos have been made among those involved.

It can only be a coincidence that Bloomberg Philanthropies provided support for Palau through its Bloomberg Ocean Initiative just two weeks after Palau announced its Nicotine Review initiative (see here, 23 June 2026).

The secrecy is ridiculous: even the Nicotine Review website’s owners have been redacted from WHOIS.

Why so shy? Why would such a bold public initiative need such privacy?

Billionaire philanthropy and nation-state capture

It certainly has the hallmarks of unaccountable, overconfident, prohibitionist billionaire philanthropist money behind it.

It conforms to a model of nation-state capture: see David Zaruk, Palau: How to Buy a Small Nation State that exists in other fora.

Palau has form when it comes to capture by NGOs: see The US Environmental Group Behind Palau’s Plan to Shrink Its Massive Marine Sanctuary, Bloomberg News, January 2024. Here is a short extract from the article:

There are no allegations of wrongdoing against The Nature Conservancy. But the organization’s influence in Palau, particularly over the marine sanctuary, raises questions about the appropriate role of powerful foreign nongovernmental organizations in developing countries.

[…]

“This appears to be a shocking example of a big NGO inserting itself in the place of the government in ways I have not seen before,” says Paige West, an anthropologist at Columbia University who studies the relationship between Western conservation groups and Pacific island indigenous cultures. “There seems to be a seamless connection between the individuals in the government and individuals who work for TNC in Palau. What does that mean for Palau’s sovereignty?”

My hunch is that some in the multi-billionaire class are frustrated that they lack the power of a nation-state in international fora. How annoying it must be to be so rich and yet still dependent on the whims of politicians.

Generally, the U.N. affords each sovereign government the same one-member, one-vote power and rights to intervene, regardless of whether the country is a small island or a superpower. So, why not hire a nation and have it do your bidding?

What should happen next?

1. The international system should not be so easily played. Consistent with respect for nation-state sovereignty, the initiative should be stopped as soon as possible, as it is an advocacy activity, not a genuine public health initiative. That could simply be the U.N. Secretary-General asking Palau to drop the initiative.

2. Full transparency is essential. Before the Secretary General transmits this review request to WHO, or before WHO spends significant time on it, there should be a full disclosure of the interest groups behind this. Imagine if a tobacco or pharmaceutical company were triggering a process like this? Would everyone just say that’s cool; we have no need to know that?

3. WHO’s Secretariat should begin with a scoping review before committing substantial resources to a process designed to feed an unaccountable NGO advocacy campaign or billionaire whim. If I were the official in charge, I would conduct a scoping review to address the big questions before burrowing down into the 19 headings of information required for an ECDD Critical Review. The decision to refer or not can be made on a few large-scale insights that can be gathered quickly. One would hope the ECDD would take minutes to conclude that the idea was barking mad and decline to indulge its backers any further.

4. If traditional respect for a sovereign nation requires the process to go by the book and treat this as a serious proposal, then the WHO Secretariat should do a thorough job, taking in reality-based insights on the nicotine market. It should draw on genuine expertise in drugs and drug control, and not import tobacco control dogma by appointing Palau’s preferred experts or people from the FCTC Secretariat. A cold, hard look at nicotine from people steeped in drug policy could even be a good thing.

Could this go badly for the proponents of prohibition?

I would like to end on a more optimistic note.

Tobacco control activists have engaged institutional machinery and culture with which they are largely unfamiliar. In my experience, people working in the illicit drugs field are often more insightful about the human condition, more technically capable, more pragmatic, and more inclined to understand and appreciate harm reduction.

Other than ending without further waste, the best outcome would be a well-crafted denunciation of anti-nicotine zealotry and dangerous misguided attempts to have the safer products banned and the most dangerous protected.

The lying liars of tobacco control deserve their comeuppance: perhaps this process will blow up on them, leaving them looking ridiculous and untrustworthy on a big international stage. That is what should happen.

We can but hope, and we must try…