In July 2022, Malaysia’s Control of Tobacco Product and Smoking Bill introduced the landmark Generational Endgame (GEG) provision, aiming to permanently shield future generations from tobacco and nicotine harm, a “perfect” tobacco and vapes/e-cigarettes endgame.
However, the removal of the GEG provision due to constitutional challenges and heavy industry lobbying, followed by the court ruling of the legal lacuna of vapes/ e-cigarettes that undermines the current regulations proves a significant regulatory overhaul is required to achieve a true Tobacco and Nicotine endgame.
Malaysia’s regulatory landscape can be described as in a whack-a-mole situation, always catching up to the tobacco industry’s newest nicotine products after significant influence over the economy has been established.
I propose the Next Generation Endgame Governance Framework (Next-GEG), reviving and expanding the original GEG provision into a novel regulatory framework that attempts to address structural vulnerabilities that the original GEG faced: constitutional problems, fiscal pressures, vape/e-cigarettes procedural gaps, political feasibility and illicit market enforcement.
The Next-GEG separates nicotine products into a two-track pathway based on economic embeddedness: measured by the product’s domestic retail value or share of national excise revenue, and social embeddedness: measured by population uptake and dependency factors crossing a certain threshold.
Track 1 covers products with high embeddedness: tobacco products and vapes/e-cigarettes, products already significantly influencing Malaysia’s economy and millions of daily lives.
For these products, the Next-GEG proposes a rolling minimum purchase age window, which increases the minimum purchase age for the product scope every year for the defined cohort, similar to the United Kingdom’s GEG approach so that eligibility effectively chases the cohort forward indefinitely.
Alongside this sits a supply-side sinking lid phase-out: shrinking quotas on the total supply of products allowed into the market while lowering nicotine concentrations permitted on a fixed timeline.
Track 2 covers products with low embeddedness: nicotine pouches, synthetic nicotine products, heated tobacco products beyond those already captured by Act 852, and novel nicotine products, emerging products that are designed to kickstart a new generation of nicotine dependent users.
For these products, the framework applies a ministerial blanket ban using Act 852’s existing powers for the entire population. It also sets classification requirements for market entry so that when a novel, modified, or unclassified product with addictive potential falls into a regulatory grey area, the product is deemed prohibited by default, pending clear classification by the Ministry of Health (MOH).
In effect, it directly addresses the vulnerability that vapes/e-cigarettes exploited under a legal grey area, ensuring the newest frontiers such as nicotine pouches stay out of the Malaysian market entirely.
Policymakers must not repeat the same mistakes made for vapes/e-cigarettes, while Track 2 makes the judgement that all nicotine products except for medicinal use don’t have a place in Malaysia.
Additionally, both tracks sit on a three-phase fiscal and enforcement architecture. Phase 1 enables temporary powers for enforcement agencies to retain seized assets from illicit tobacco and vape raids, to directly fund their enforcement capabilities. Phase 2 brings significant excise increases on cigarettes and vapes contingent on a downward trend of the illicit market through enforcement.
Phase 3 establishes a transition fund, funded by incremental excise revenue from phase two, across five mandated expenditure categories: enforcement infrastructure, worker retraining and redundancy support, public health campaigns, clean industry investment grants, and small retailer exit grants.
The sequencing matters: Malaysia’s illicit tobacco and vape/e-cigarette market has always been a major talking point to deter serious regulations, so this framework is designed to finance itself through the enforcement it enables, incentivising effective enforcement of the illicit market which fuels progress.
The framework further commissions MOH and University of Malaya to conduct an independent economic assessment of the entire Next-GEG framework, commits to continuous public engagement through clear and transparent communication of the current policy situation and its factors (Knowing the complexities), and proposes that all components of the Next-GEG be constitutionally ring-fenced to require a supermajority to abolish to raise the political cost of reversal that should only happen if there are unaccounted consequences, not abolished under any administration’s short term fiscal agenda.
Put simply, Track 1 is about managing an exit: choking out products that are already embedded into Malaysia’s economy. Track 2 is about preventing an entry: keeping out products that have not yet taken hold to embed itself into Malaysia’s economy.
This distinction ends any pathway for nicotine products to plague Malaysia in the future, while the additional regulatory mechanisms makes addressing the structural vulnerabilities of any such serious endgame part of its proposal.
The original GEG was lost because its obvious public health objectives could not be put as the ultimate priority. This Next-GEG recognises that any regulation that can be struck down by a single legal challenge or stalled by industry lobbying is not really an endgame at all, and the only way to create a true tobacco and nicotine endgame is to make it defensible enough to pass into law.
Constitutionally, the Next-GEG is more defensible against constitutional infringement as it builds upon existing minimum age purchase law, which already satisfies rational nexus(Clear, logical reason) and intelligible differentia (precise distinction).
The vulnerability that vapes/e-cigarettes used to enter the market in a regulatory grey area is also closed through the classification requirement and prohibited by default public shield.
Politically, the three-phase fiscal and enforcement architecture creates a self-sustaining enforcement loop where excise collection funded by the tobacco industry manages economic backlash, while making it contingent on managing the illicit market addresses the tobacco industries favourite argument.
At the end of the day, it is up to Malaysia’s political will to be serious about an endgame, as illicit market enforcement, legal challenges and industry lobbying cannot be addressed by any well-designed solution.
If Malaysia is to achieve its target of 5 per cent smoking prevalence by 2045, policymakers must look past idealistic short-term regulatory mechanisms and focus on implementing an adaptive, market-aware sequencing model that ensures legislation never outpaces the state’s capacity to enforce it.
Kingsun Lim is an independent policy researcher and author of the Next-Generation Endgame Governance Framework (Next-GEG).
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
