Public Health Theater
The Nanny State That Brought Back Marlboros
On the day Utah banned flavored vapes, everything changed. Imperceptible at first, but now impossible to ignore.
Nothing in my shop moved. The shelves stayed where they were. The customers kept coming. The conversations felt familiar. But something underneath shifted. Quietly. Then steadily.
Cigarette sales started ticking up.
Not dramatically. Not like a rush. But enough that I noticed. Enough that I had to start restocking brands I hadn’t needed to keep in volume for years. Enough that I heard something I hadn’t heard in a long time:
“I think cigarettes are safer now.”
That came from a 21-year-old. She walked in looking for a flavored vape. With the selection stripped and the options bleak, she shrugged and bought a pack of Marlboros. She wasn’t defiant. She wasn’t making a statement. She was confused and settling.
She wasn’t the only one. A friend of mine, a physician at the Salt Lake VA Hospital, recently told me she’s been stunned by how many of her patients are going back to smoking now that their vape supply is running out. Older veterans. People with complex medical histories. Many had switched to flavored vapes. Now, she said, they’re lighting up again. She was shocked. I wasn’t. I’ve been watching it happen in real time.
The Performance of Policy
How a moral panic replaced harm reduction.
Public health policy, at its best, is supposed to reduce harm. Help people make better choices. Meet them where they are.
That’s not what happened here.
Instead, Utah’s flavored vape ban, like many others, was packaged and sold as a moral intervention — a rescue mission for the youth. Legislators spoke of “pipelines of addiction,” of evil flavors luring children, of saving the next generation from a lifetime of nicotine use. They framed vape shops like mine as part of the problem. The product was bad. The people selling it were worse. The solution, they claimed, was simple: ban flavors.
But here’s the part they never talk about: the most dangerous nicotine product, cigarettes, remained untouched.
So now, in the wake of their “victory,” what are we left with?
Flavored vapes: banned.
Cigarettes: fully legal, fully stocked, and gaining traction once again.
I used to carry a full display of flavored vape products that helped hundreds of my customers quit smoking. Today that shelf is nearly empty. The cigarette wall, once shrinking, is expanding again.
And what do lawmakers say? Senator Jen Plumb, the bill’s sponsor, insists:
“This bill does not take away Utahns’ ability to vape.”
It’s a clever line, technically true and practically meaningless. A smoker who wants to quit doesn’t want unflavored, weak, expensive options. They want something that works. What’s left now feels like a trap: you can vape, sure, but we’ve removed everything that made vaping a viable path away from smoking.
That’s not harm reduction. That’s prohibition with better PR.
And while public health officials congratulated themselves for “taking a stand,” two groups quietly benefited:
Big Tobacco, and the State of Utah.
Cigarette sales are still the engine of the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), the multibillion-dollar deal made in 1998 that funnels money from cigarette companies to the states. The more people smoke, the more the states get paid. Vapes and pouches? Not part of the deal.
So when Utah bans the most effective alternatives to smoking and leaves cigarettes untouched, it’s not just a policy failure, it’s a payday.
And it’s not just the state budget that cashes in. Many of the loudest anti-nicotine groups — the ones driving the flavor ban hysteria — are themselves funded by MSA dollars. The same money that depends on smoking staying alive is being used to shout down the very tools that could end it.
The anti-tobacco movement has become the financial enforcement arm of the cigarette status quo.
They ban flavors with one hand while holding out the other for cigarette settlement checks.
If it sounds upside down, that’s because it is.
(For more on how the Master Settlement Agreement created this twisted incentive structure, I explained it here.)
The Cast of Characters
Who made it happen, and who stood by.
Senator Jen Plumb: The Moral Voice
Plumb didn’t just sponsor SB61, she made herself its moral center. Her speeches were heavy with phrases like “pipelines of addiction” and “good works,” as if banning flavored vapes was akin to passing the Civil Rights Act.
She assured the public this wasn’t prohibition, that “Utahns still have the ability to vape.”
But that’s the kind of statement that only makes sense on paper.
Try saying that to a former smoker who used mango vapes to quit, now faced with a shelf full of unflavored disposable trash, or worse, a wall of Marlboros. “You can still vape” is about as comforting as telling someone drowning that the ocean still technically has oxygen in it.
Plumb may be sincere, but sincerity without evidence isn’t leadership. It’s theater.
Senators Adams and Cullimore: The Quiet Enablers
Senate President Stuart Adams and Senator Kirk Cullimore had the power to stop this bill or at least demand that it include real harm reduction pathways. They didn’t. Instead, they joined the standing ovation. Not one of them stood up and said: “Wait, why are we banning the alternatives but leaving cigarettes untouched?”
The Health Authorities Who Spoke the Truth and Then Did Nothing
At the national level, the pattern is familiar. Health officials at the FDA, HHS, and even former Surgeon Generals have publicly acknowledged that vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking. They’ve used terms like “risk continuum” and “tobacco harm reduction,” then turned around and approved exactly none of the products that adults actually use to quit.
They spoke the truth, then regulated against it.
The Researchers Being Ignored
Some researchers are still trying to hold the line. Arielle Selya, PhD, recently broke down a major UK study claiming that teen vapers would inevitably become smokers. Her analysis showed the conclusion wasn’t based on observed behavior, it was based on assumptions modeled into the data.
But here in Utah, like in many places, that kind of nuance doesn’t make the news. Our media doesn’t challenge the narrative. It amplifies it.
We don't have a health journalism ecosystem. We have a headline factory.
And what doesn’t fit the script doesn’t make the stage.
The Audience Never Booed
Media complicity and the culture of silence.
Every production needs an audience. And in Utah, the audience doesn’t throw tomatoes. It claps politely, writes up a glowing review, and leaves the theater convinced they’ve witnessed something brave.
That’s what makes the performance work.
While lawmakers pushed SB61 with exaggerated claims and selective science, Utah’s media stood by like a quiet stagehand. No serious coverage from KSL. No deep dive from the Salt Lake Tribune. No pushback from Deseret News.
KSL called it a “celebration.”
The Tribune reprinted Senator Plumb’s claim that adult access would be “preserved.”
Deseret News echoed that flavored vapes “target youth.”
Not one of them asked what would happen to the adults who used those flavors to quit. Not one asked what it means when cigarette sales go up after a so-called public health victory. Not one asked who benefits when safer nicotine products are taken off the market and Marlboros are left untouched.
We don't have an opposition press in Utah. We have a chorus.
This is part of a broader pattern. Governor Cox’s signature issue, his Utah Fits All voucher program — handed out no-bid contracts to major campaign donors. Dedra Henderson’s office withheld voter data from the Attorney General’s office, potentially violating the law. These aren’t rumors. These are facts. And yet, silence.
SB61 wasn’t passed in a vacuum. It was passed in a culture of complicity, where political theater is allowed to stand in for real governance because no one in the media has the courage to shout “This is a performance.”
The Violence of Indifference
When policy harms the people it claims to help.
They say SB61 was a victory. A win for kids, a win for health, a win for the future.
But if this is victory — more people smoking, more veterans relapsing, more adults abandoned and confused — what would defeat look like?
C.S. Lewis once warned us about the most dangerous kind of tyranny: the kind carried out with moral conviction.
“A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims,” he wrote, “may be the most oppressive.”
That’s what we’re living through now.
This isn’t malice. It’s worse. It’s public policy guided by people so convinced of their own goodness that they can’t see — or refuse to see — the harm they’re doing.
They don’t have to watch someone walk into a shop ashamed, asking for cigarettes after months off.
They don’t have to answer when a veteran says, “I can’t find my vape anymore.”
They just pass the bill, say the words, and move on.
But I see them. Every day.
And I know exactly where this is going.
And the Band Played On
When public health becomes performance.
Public health theater is still playing on every stage in America. In some places it’s more dramatic, in others more subtle. But the plot is always the same:
Say it’s about kids.
Say the data is clear.
Say the ban is necessary.
Say nothing when cigarettes come roaring back.
In Utah, we banned the tools that helped people quit smoking and left the cigarettes alone. We pretended that was progress. We clapped for it. Our lawmakers gave speeches. Our media gave them cover. And the audience, mostly, stayed silent.
But behind the curtain, something else happened:
Veterans lit up again.
Young adults stopped trying to quit.
Big Tobacco made a quiet comeback.
And the people who were trying — really trying — were left holding nothing.
I run a smoke shop. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a politician. But I watch people. I listen. I see what works and what doesn’t. And I know this much:
You don’t reduce harm by banning the less harmful thing that helps.
You don’t protect people by taking away their choices.
And you sure as hell don’t win a war on smoking by handing out Marlboros and calling it virtue.
This wasn’t public health.
It was theater.
And the only people who got hurt were the ones who needed help the most.
James Deighan owns and operates a smoke shop in Utah. He writes about public policy, harm reduction, and political theater at ThoughtSmoke.