Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) has urged the government to review its plan to ban electronic cigarettes and vaping, describing it as government overreach in people’s personal habits.
PSM chairman Dr Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj agreed that vaping was bad for health, but said criminalising the habit would be the wrong way to discourage it.
He said the duty of governments was to ensure that people’s activities do not negatively affect others or the environment, which meant that banning vaping in places like eateries, or the sale of vapes to minors, would be fair.
“But a law that criminalises vaping, even in the privacy of one’s home or a designated vaping space, is gross overreach of governmental authority.
“Put bluntly, a person should have the right to engage in an activity even if it is bad for their health, as long as that activity does not adversely affect others.
“The state can advise, cajole and persuade them, but it should not coerce the individual to live ‘healthily’ by criminalising that activity.
“If vaping can be criminalised, then why not the consumption of alcohol? What about sugar consumption? Or being obese? These, too, have significant adverse effects on a person’s health,” he said in a statement.
Jeyakumar added that the criminalising of “bad habits” usually fails to eradicate the practice and only drives them underground, leading to a booming black market for the products, citing the US’s Prohibition era as an example.
Making vapes illegal as a whole would also mean that health authorities would no longer be monitoring and sampling vape products to ensure that no harmful additives are in them, he said.
The former MP also said that punishing vaping or the sale of vapes with jail time would only see more sent to Malaysia’s already-crowded prisons, potentially pushing them to a “downward spiral of marginalisation and delinquency”.
“I would therefore urge all those who would like to pass coercive legislation like banning vaping and the generational endgame for smoking to reconsider these initiatives.
“Criminalising unhealthy personal habits should not be the way to go, unless we do not mind steering our society towards an Orwellian ‘1984′-type situation,” he said, referencing the George Orwell book about a dystopian future with a government that spies on its citizens.
On Saturday, health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad said a Cabinet memorandum on the ban of electronic cigarettes and vaping would be tabled before the Cabinet by the end of this year.
Multiple state governments have already started to move in that direction, although Dzulkefly said Putrajaya would avoid imposing such a ban for now to prevent possible legal challenges from vape industry players.
