As of January 1 next year, users of electronic cigarettes or vapes and nicotine pouches will be affected by various restrictions. Traders will have to comply with strict requirements, such as no longer selling vapes with different smells and flavors, but businesses are already coming up with ideas to get around the ban, Latvian Television reported on December 26.
The list of changes is long. From January tobacco products, substitute products, and electronic smoking devices will not be sold to people under 20.
There will also be changes to the offer. For example, until now, disposables and liquids for refillable ‘vapes’ could be bought in a huge range of flavors, from sweet cherry to “aurora borealis”. The products were also popular with under-age people. This has been repeatedly raised by drug experts and educational institutions in recent years. Now it will all be banned. Products will be allowed to be offered without flavor or with only the taste and smell of tobacco.
But traders are in no hurry to close their shops. They are evasive about how they will make a profit, and several companies did not answer Latvian Television at all. However, LTV has unofficial information that companies selling refillable vapes are looking for ways to sell the same products from January.
For example, one company is currently selling refillable flavored vapes. These will not be available from January. So they have come up with the idea of selling two products: one bottle contains nicotine without taste and smell. The other bottle contains flavoring.
The customer mixes the bottles together after purchase and essentially gets the same product as before.
LTV asked the Association of Traditional and Smokeless Tobacco Products about these possible schemes. The association neither denies nor confirms the claim. They say they have not heard of such options and do not know whether they could be legally implemented. The Association stresses their earlier view that illicit trade would flourish.
“I assume that, as with other products, relatives and friends will be able to bring them back from abroad. Surely, like all illegal things, trade via Telegram will flourish. It is difficult to catch,” says Anrijs Matīss, a member of the association’s board.
The association estimates that the state budget would lose around €10 million a year. However, only one of the companies approached responded. It says it does not yet know whether and how widespread the losses are expected to be. All shops will continue to operate.
“There will certainly be alternatives after the new year which can be offered to the customer, but there will not be such a wide range. We will increase the range and after a while it will definitely be bigger,” says Jekaterina Smirnova of Ecodumas.
With these restrictions, the requirements for nicotine pouches will be stricter. They have a reduced nicotine limit and are currently not produced with such a low nicotine level. The industry therefore expects them to disappear from the shelves, at least temporarily.
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