RECENT Malaysian campus data indicates a worrying trend – vaping among youth remains a public health problem despite ongoing efforts to free teens of the addiction.
Across varsities, no-smoking and no-vaping signage feature prominently in common areas, hostels, and faculties yet these are often ignored, with students continuing to use tobacco products in less visible spaces, such as car parks, toilets, private rooms, stairwells, and campus gates, Monash University Malaysia Assoc Prof Dr Anne Yee told StarEdu.
“This hidden use of e-cigarettes is not just a minor act of rule-breaking, a lifestyle choice or a cleaner, more modern substitute for cigarettes. It’s a serious health concern,” she said, citing the “Vaping among Malaysian students 2022–2024: A systematic review of prevalence, awareness and influencing factors” findings which examined nine cross-sectional studies involving 2,828 tertiary students from public and private institutions in Malaysia.
Rules alone don’t work
A closer look at evidence from Malaysian learning institutions raises a difficult question: are we allowing nicotine addiction to return in a sweeter, more socially acceptable form? Dr Yee asked.
“The clouds drifting across Malaysian campuses are not harmless.
The sooner we treat them with the same seriousness as the cigarette smoke they replaced, the better placed we will be to help the students breathing them in,” she said, adding that institutions with the lowest vaping rates may not simply be those with the strictest rules, but those where health literacy is meaningfully built into the student learning experience.
“If Malaysia is serious about protecting young people, the response must match the complexity of the problem by combining policy enforcement, accessible cessation support, curriculum-based health education, and counter-messaging through the same digital platforms that the vaping industry already uses so effectively,” she said.
Another promising option, she offered, is an anti-vaping programme designed with input from people who have lived experience as vapers.
Their perspectives can help make prevention messages more realistic, relatable, and credible to students who may otherwise dismiss standard health warnings, she said, calling for stricter enforcement of the Control of Smoking Products for Public Health Act 2024.
“Malaysia’s first comprehensive legal framework covering both tobacco and vaping products mandates product registration, restricts advertising and sponsorship, and imposes age-of-sale restrictions.
“But e-cigarettes continue to be accessible through e-commerce platforms, social media marketplaces, and cross-border channels. The National Health and Morbidity Survey 2019 has already documented a significant rise in e-cigarette use among males aged 15 to 24 years and legislation has yet to reverse that trajectory,” she said.
HEBAT (Henti, Elak, Basmi Asap Tembakau) programme lead Assoc Prof Dr Nur Amani Ahmad Tajuddin said the goal is to have a programme that reaches out to adolescents on their terms.
“School-going children vape because they think it’s less harmful compared to cigarettes and it doesn’t leave a ‘bad’ odour on their clothes so the parents won’t find out. They want to emulate celebrities and influencers on social media and to fit in. Others vape because of family problems. However, after participating in the HEBAT programme, most want to stop and have sought help from school counsellors.”
HEBAT, a youth-based anti-tobacco programme conducted by the UM Nicotine Addiction Research and Collaborating Group since 2018, is aimed at training youth advocates in understanding evidence-based harms of tobacco and vaping products, and to prevent new uptake while helping those who have started, quit.
Substituting traditional lectures with interactive role-plays and games, the programme employs digital advocacy strategies to promote anti-tobacco messaging.
“We’ve trained some 950 tertiary students to become community health advocates, reaching out to more than 10,000 primary and secondary school students nationwide,” she said.
