OLIVER DICKSON | Parliament has taken a step forward on tobacco. Now comes the harder part

The health portfolio committee’s vote of desirability on the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill this week was not the end of anything. It was the beginning of the work that actually matters.

Ten parties voted in favour of the desirability of the bill. One party, the Freedom Front Plus, voted against. The 10-1 result sounds decisive, and in procedural terms it is. But a consideration of the substantive conversation and debate on the bill paints a more interesting and complex picture.

Nearly every party that voted yes immediately qualified its support with a list of amendments it intends to pursue in the clause-by-clause phase that follows.

Supporting the desirability of a bill, as members took care to emphasise, is not endorsing the bill as it currently stands. It is permission for parliament to keep working. That permission has now been granted. The question is whether parliament will use it wisely.

I wrote in December that public health without a scientific-led approach, compassion and common sense is just policy theatre. That argument has not changed. What has changed is the context.

The committee chairperson made remarks last week that deserve more attention than they have received. She acknowledged that the department of health has formally accepted the principle of differentiation, that it is not scientifically sound to treat all tobacco and nicotine products as identical as though they pose an equal and unvaried risk of harm to users and public health, more broadly. That is a significant concession, and one the clause-by-clause process must now honour in practice, not just in principle.

Here is where the risk lies. A bill can acknowledge differentiation in its preamble and then obliterate it in its operative clauses. Good intentions at the level of framing mean nothing if the regulatory architecture that follows treats a cigarette and a heated tobacco product as legally equivalent. They are not equivalent.

Combustible cigarettes burn tobacco and release thousands of toxins through that combustion. Non-combustible alternatives carry a fundamentally different risk profile. That difference is not a tobacco industry talking point; it is the scientific basis on which the UK’s health authorities have built a coherent harm reduction strategy.

South Africa now has the opportunity, flagged by the chairperson herself, to become one of the first countries to regulate all tobacco and nicotine products within a single legislative framework that reflects their actual risk profiles. That is ambitious. It is also achievable. But it requires lawmakers to resist pressure from both extremes: those who believe any accommodation of nicotine products is capitulation to industry, and those who believe the state has no business intervening at all. Both are wrong. The sensible middle ground is where public health actually wins.

The job of evidence-based policy is not to wish people’s behaviour into alignment with our preferences. It is to design a regulatory environment that reduces harm in the real world and protects children and adolescents as a point of priority, not as an afterthought.

Millions of South Africans who smoke will not simply stop because the law tells them to. The question is whether the law is designed to empower them to make better decisions, or merely to perform concern about them.

The amendments proposed in the line-by-line phase must do three things.

What gives me cautious optimism about this week’s vote is not the number. It is the content. Across party lines — MK, the DA, the EFF — there was notable convergence on the need for differentiation, stronger illicit trade enforcement, and protection for informal traders from the unintended consequences of sweeping regulation.

First, embed a clear legal delineation between combustible and non-combustible products that reflects their respective risk profiles. Regulating vaping products and oral nicotine alternatives with the same blunt instrument applied to cigarettes is not caution, it is scientific illiteracy dressed as virtue.

Second, ensure that lower-risk alternatives face regulatory friction proportionate to their actual harm, not the harm of the most dangerous product in the category. Remove that incentive to switch and you get the precise opposite of what the bill is supposed to achieve.

Third, empower the public with information. A blanket ban on all communication about smoke-free products does not protect people, it keeps them ignorant. Adult smokers making choices about their own health deserve access to honest, clinically grounded information about the relative risks of available products.

Parliament and the department of health must use every available platform — public consultations, health communications, the parliamentary process itself — not to lecture people, but to give them the tools to make better decisions. That is not a concession to industry. It is basic respect for the intelligence and autonomy of South African citizens.

And fourth, importantly, the line-by-line phase must place emphasis on the protection of children by empowering the regulatory organ.

What gives me cautious optimism about this week’s vote is not the number. It is the content. Across party lines — MK, the DA, the EFF — there was notable convergence on the need for differentiation, stronger illicit trade enforcement, and protection for informal traders from the unintended consequences of sweeping regulation. That convergence is a mandate. Parliament should treat it as one.

South Africa already knows how to do this. We bent the HIV curve not by moralising at people but by meeting them where they were — condoms, testing, treatment, non-judgmental services.

The bill’s desirability has been confirmed. Now parliament must approach the clause-by-clause phase with the urgency and rigour the moment demands. The scientific and empirical evidence exists. The political will, at least in part, is present. What is needed now is the discipline to translate both into law that actually works — not a bill that looks bold on paper and disappoints in practice.

The public health stakes are too high, and so is the credibility of a parliament that must prove it can legislate in the national interest, not just gesture towards it.

Oliver Dickson is a renowned debate champion and an award-nominated radio broadcaster and TV presenter