Will the tobacco ban backfire?

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.

- By Dr. Vindhya Weeratunga

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.