The Bootleggers and Baptists Paradox: How Anti Vaping Campaigns Can Protect the Cigarette Market

One of political economy’s most revealing ideas is the Bootleggers and Baptists paradox.

The phrase may sound quaint, but it describes a pattern that repeatedly emerges when governments pursue prohibition or heavy regulation: groups with very different motivations, even conflicting values, can end up supporting the same policy because each benefits from it in its own way.

Economist Bruce Yandle developed the concept while examining alcohol prohibition in the United States. The “Baptists” were the moral campaigners. They sincerely believed alcohol caused social harm and that prohibition would create a healthier, more virtuous society.

The “bootleggers” had a very different interest. Restrictions on legal alcohol removed legitimate competition and made the illicit trade more profitable. They did not need to advocate for prohibition publicly; the moral campaigners were already doing that work for them.

Yandle’s insight was that these groups did not need to coordinate. They simply benefited from the same policy for different reasons.

The same dynamic is worth considering in today’s debate over vaping.

Many anti-vaping organisations frame their work as a public health mission: protecting young people, preventing nicotine dependence and moving towards a nicotine-free society. Those are intuitively appealing goals. Few people would oppose protecting children or reducing harm.

But public policy should not be assessed by its slogans or intentions alone.

It should be assessed by its outcomes.

That is where parts of the modern anti-vaping movement deserve more scrutiny.

For years, vaping has often been treated not as a harm reduction tool for adult smokers, but as a threat to be defeated. The crucial distinction between combustible cigarettes and smoke free nicotine products is frequently blurred. Potential vaping risks are presented prominently, while the vastly greater danger of continued smoking receives less attention.

That is not merely an academic disagreement. It has real consequences.

When smokers come to believe vaping is as harmful as smoking, or worse, many will see little reason to switch. When governments regulate vaping as harshly as cigarettes, or more harshly, they make it harder for smokers to access a potentially lower risk alternative.

Higher prices, fewer product choices, flavour bans and the closure of specialist retailers do not primarily weaken cigarettes.

They weaken a competitor to cigarettes.

For decades, combustible tobacco enjoyed a dominant position in the nicotine market because few products could genuinely compete with it. Nicotine patches, gum and lozenges have helped many people quit, but they never substantially disrupted cigarette sales.

Vaping did.

For the first time, many smokers found a product that delivered nicotine without combustion, the process responsible for most smoking-related diseases. They did not switch because governments instructed them to. They switched because, for them, vaping was a workable substitute for cigarettes.

That should have prompted a serious public health question: how can lower-risk nicotine products help accelerate the decline of smoking?

Too often, the conversation moved in another direction.

Rather than focusing on how vaping could displace cigarettes among adult smokers, campaigns have concentrated on portraying it as the next public health emergency. Studies identifying potential risks receive extensive attention. Evidence that vaping has helped smokers move away from cigarettes is often downplayed, heavily qualified or eclipsed by warnings about youth use.

The result is a public increasingly confused about relative risk.

Many people now believe vaping is as harmful as smoking, despite the absence of combustion. That misunderstanding matters because risk perception shapes behaviour. A smoker who sees no meaningful difference between smoking and vaping is less likely to make a change.

Fear is politically effective. It generates attention, mobilises support and helps justify restrictive policy.

But fear can also distort proportion.

This is where the Bootleggers and Baptists paradox becomes difficult to ignore.

Every policy that makes vaping less accessible can weaken one of cigarettes’ most significant competitors.

Every campaign that discourages smokers from switching can leave more people purchasing combustible tobacco.

Every approach that treats lower-risk alternatives as morally unacceptable can, intentionally or not, preserve the market position of the product responsible for the overwhelming burden of tobacco-related disease.

Anti-vaping campaigners may regard those restrictions as public health victories.

The cigarette market has little reason to object.

That does not mean anti-vaping advocates and tobacco companies are allies, nor does it require any conspiracy. The paradox is more subtle than that. It is about incentives and outcomes: two groups can benefit from the same policy without sharing motives, values or strategy.

The more troubling issue is the reluctance to confront unintended consequences.

Policies are often defended according to their intentions rather than their results. Yet if restrictions discourage smokers from switching, fuel illicit supply or worsen public misunderstanding about relative risk, those outcomes should not be dismissed as unfortunate side effects. They should be treated as evidence that the policy may be failing.

Good science requires a willingness to change course when the evidence changes. Public health advocacy should demand the same intellectual discipline.

Responsible regulation is necessary: products should be subject to quality controls, accurate labelling, age restrictions and meaningful enforcement against sales to minors.

But there is a substantial difference between regulation and prohibition disguised as regulation.

Australia illustrates the stakes. Restricting legal access does not eliminate nicotine demand. When legal supply becomes difficult to access, expensive or impractical, demand can migrate to illicit channels. That creates opportunities for unregulated products, illegal tobacco and organised criminal networks.

This is not a uniquely Australian problem, nor is it a new one. It reflects a basic economic reality: when governments restrict legal supply without removing demand, someone else will step in to meet it.

History has taught that lesson repeatedly.

The people who bear the cost are rarely the activists or policymakers. They are smokers who might otherwise have moved away from cigarettes; consumers pushed towards unregulated products; and communities affected when illicit markets become more profitable.

The Bootleggers and Baptists paradox reminds us that policies can create winners who never appear in the press release. It also reminds us that good intentions are not a defence against bad outcomes.

If anti-vaping organisations genuinely want to reduce smoking-related disease, they should confront an uncomfortable possibility: some of the policies they champion may delay smokers’ transition away from cigarettes, strengthen illicit markets and inadvertently protect the commercial position of combustible tobacco.

That conclusion is uncomfortable.

But uncomfortable conclusions are often where honest analysis leads.

The central question is not whether vaping is perfect. It is whether public policy can distinguish between products by their relative risk and whether it is willing to use harm reduction to displace the product doing the greatest harm.

In the determination to defeat vaping, some of its fiercest opponents may be preserving the very cigarette market they have spent decades trying to dismantle.

That is the enduring force of the Bootleggers and Baptists paradox. Moral certainty, when it hardens into ideological rigidity, can end up protecting exactly the system it set out to destroy.