2 hands with smoke around wrists like handcuffs, a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray.

Unmasking the Appeal: Countering Tobacco and Nicotine Addiction

World No Tobacco Day 2026 turns the spotlight on industry tactics that hook a new generation on nicotine, even as decades of tobacco control progress hang in the balance.

Globally, adolescents are now nine times more likely to vape than adults. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 15 million young people between the ages of 13 and 15 already use e-cigarettes, and more than 100 million people worldwide vape overall. These figures, released in the WHO's first global estimate of e-cigarette use in October 2025, point to what officials have described as a new wave of nicotine addiction, even as the global tobacco epidemic is far from over.

Each year on May 31, the world observes World No Tobacco Day to raise awareness of the harms of tobacco and nicotine use and to advocate for stronger policies to prevent them. This year, the WHO is rallying around the theme “Unmask the appeal: countering tobacco and nicotine addiction,” focusing on how the tobacco and nicotine industries design their products to keep young people stuck in a cycle of addiction, and on the policy levers that can break that cycle.

Tobacco use remains one of the world’s leading causes of preventable death, killing more than 7 million people each year, including an estimated 1.6 million non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. The good news is that progress is real: the number of tobacco users worldwide fell from 1.38 billion in 2000 to 1.20 billion in 2024, and 6.1 billion people are now protected by at least one best-practice tobacco control measure under the WHO’s MPOWER framework. The bad news is that the pace of decline is uneven, the world will fall short of the Sustainable Development Goal target of a 30 percent relative reduction in tobacco use by 2025, and the harms continue to fall most heavily on low- and middle-income countries, where roughly 80 percent of the world’s smokers live.

The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), now more than two decades old, has been the backbone of the global response. Its MPOWER package brings together six demand-reduction measures: monitoring tobacco use, protecting people from smoke, offering help to quit, warning about the dangers, enforcing bans on advertising and promotion, and raising taxes. Countries that have adopted these measures at the best-practice level have seen substantial declines in smoking prevalence and tobacco-related deaths. Yet implementation remains incomplete: only four countries have achieved the full MPOWER package, and tobacco taxes, the single most cost-effective intervention, remain underused in most of the world.

Meanwhile, the products themselves are changing. As tighter regulations have cut into combustible cigarette sales, the industry has rapidly expanded into e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, and nicotine pouches, often marketed as cleaner or harm-reducing alternatives. The WHO and independent researchers have documented how these products are engineered to maximize appeal: thousands of sweet and fruity flavors, sleek and concealable device designs, high-nicotine formulations, and aggressive digital marketing on the platforms young people use most. A 2024 WHO report describes this as a deliberate strategy to capture the next generation of consumers, and the evidence is showing up in the data. Worldwide, an estimated 7.2 percent of adolescents aged 13 to 15 now use e-cigarettes, with the WHO cautioning that the true figure is almost certainly higher than current surveys capture.

The challenge for policymakers is that the global picture now involves two parallel challenges: a slowly receding combustible tobacco epidemic and a rapidly expanding nicotine one. Countering both will require sustained investment in the policies that already work, full MPOWER implementation, higher tobacco taxes, plain packaging, comprehensive advertising bans, alongside new measures tailored to novel products. The WHO’s 2026 call to action focuses on banning flavors, regulating product design to reduce appeal and addictiveness, and protecting young people from industry marketing across digital channels. Unmasking the appeal, in other words, means treating the design of these products and the strategies behind them as central to the public health response, not peripheral to it.

To learn more about the global tobacco epidemic, explore our resource pack on Global Health and Tobacco or check out the selected resources below.

Selected Resources

The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University supports interdisciplinary education about world health through the production, curation, and dissemination of educational public goods. Our digital repository is a searchable library of reputable resources that support learning and teaching about interdisciplinary global health challenges. The repository includes both general resources, such as reports, articles, country profiles, and data, and teaching resources, such as teaching cases and lesson-based teaching packs. 

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