For many years, debates about nicotine regulation have been framed as a choice between allowing products onto the market or banning them altogether. As new smoke-free nicotine products have emerged, public discussion has often focused on restrictions relating to flavours, nicotine concentrations, advertising, taxation, or outright prohibition. While these policy debates remain important, they can sometimes overshadow a more fundamental question: what standards should nicotine products be required to meet if they are legally available?
As governments continue to review their tobacco and nicotine frameworks, there is growing recognition that effective regulation is not simply about determining which products may be sold. It is also about ensuring that products reaching consumers consistently meet appropriate standards of quality, safety, transparency, and accountability.
For GINN, this represents an important evolution in nicotine governance. Rather than relying primarily on product bans, regulators have an opportunity to build stronger regulatory systems through science-based performance standards that protect consumers while adapting to innovation.
From Restriction to Regulation
Every regulator has a responsibility to protect public health. In some circumstances, restricting products may be justified where evidence demonstrates unacceptable risks or where products fail to comply with established legal requirements.
However, regulation should not end with deciding whether a product is permitted or prohibited.
When a product remains legally available, governments also have a responsibility to define the conditions under which it may be manufactured, tested, marketed, monitored, and improved. This broader regulatory approach recognises that consumer protection depends not only on market access but also on the quality of products that reach consumers.
Performance standards provide a practical framework for achieving this objective.
What Are Performance Standards?
Performance standards establish measurable requirements that products must satisfy before they can be introduced and maintained in the marketplace. Rather than focusing solely on the type of product being regulated, they focus on whether the product consistently performs according to clearly defined scientific and regulatory expectations.
Within nicotine regulation, this could include requirements governing manufacturing consistency, ingredient quality, contaminant limits, nicotine-content accuracy, product stability, transparent labelling, child-resistant packaging, and systems for monitoring adverse events after products reach consumers.
These standards allow regulators to move beyond broad product classifications and instead evaluate whether manufacturers are consistently meeting objective requirements that can be independently verified.
This approach shifts regulatory attention from simply asking “Should this product exist?” to asking “Does this product consistently meet the standards required to protect consumers?”
Learning from Other Regulatory Sectors
Performance standards are already widely used across many areas of public health regulation.
Medicines are subject to strict manufacturing standards designed to ensure quality, consistency, and safety. Medical devices must demonstrate that they perform as intended while meeting established regulatory requirements. Food manufacturers are required to comply with production, hygiene, labelling, and contaminant standards before products reach supermarket shelves.
These systems do not eliminate every potential risk. Instead, they establish clear expectations that manufacturers must continuously meet while allowing regulators to monitor compliance and intervene when standards are not achieved.
Nicotine regulation can benefit from the same philosophy.
Rather than viewing product approval as the end of regulatory oversight, performance standards recognise that maintaining product quality requires ongoing monitoring, continuous improvement, and regulatory accountability.
Encouraging Better Products
One of the strengths of performance-based regulation is that it encourages manufacturers to improve products over time.
When regulatory expectations are clear, manufacturers have incentives to strengthen quality assurance systems, improve manufacturing processes, reduce unnecessary contaminants, enhance ingredient consistency, and invest in research that supports product development.
Innovation therefore becomes aligned with consumer protection rather than existing independently of it.
As scientific knowledge evolves, regulators can revise performance standards to reflect new evidence, creating a regulatory framework capable of improving alongside advances in science and technology.
This approach recognises that regulation should not remain static. Good governance adapts as understanding improves.
Strengthening Consumer Confidence
Consumers reasonably expect that products legally available for sale have been subject to meaningful regulatory oversight.
Performance standards help support that confidence by establishing transparent expectations for product quality and manufacturing consistency.
Independent testing, accurate ingredient disclosure, reliable nicotine-content labelling, and robust quality assurance systems all contribute to greater consumer confidence while assisting healthcare professionals, retailers, and regulators in making informed decisions.
Where products fail to meet established standards, regulators have clear mechanisms for corrective action, product recalls, or enforcement measures.
This creates greater accountability throughout the supply chain while reinforcing public confidence in regulatory systems.
Supporting Evidence-Based Policymaking
Scientific evidence does not remain fixed. New studies continually improve our understanding of product design, toxicology, consumer behaviour, manufacturing processes, and long-term health outcomes.
Performance standards provide regulators with a practical mechanism for incorporating new evidence into existing regulatory frameworks.
Rather than repeatedly rewriting legislation every time new information emerges, regulators can refine technical standards, testing requirements, manufacturing specifications, or labelling expectations as scientific knowledge develops.
This makes regulatory systems more flexible, proportionate, and responsive to evolving evidence.
Importantly, it also reinforces a fundamental principle of evidence-based policymaking: regulation should evolve as science evolves.
Preparing for Future Innovation
The nicotine market continues to change rapidly.
Alongside nicotine pouches, electronic cigarettes, and heated tobacco products, future innovations may introduce entirely new nicotine delivery technologies that do not fit neatly within today’s regulatory categories.
Frameworks based exclusively on individual product classifications may struggle to keep pace with technological change.
Performance standards offer greater adaptability because they regulate measurable characteristics rather than specific technologies.
Regardless of how future nicotine products are designed, regulators can continue to assess manufacturing quality, ingredient transparency, product consistency, consumer safety, and post-market performance using common regulatory principles.
This creates a regulatory system that remains relevant even as innovation continues.
Balancing Innovation and Public Health
Supporting innovation should never come at the expense of public health. Equally, protecting public health does not require regulators to discourage innovation that improves product quality or strengthens consumer safeguards.
Performance standards help balance these objectives.
By establishing clear scientific expectations, regulators can encourage manufacturers to develop products that meet increasingly rigorous standards while ensuring that public health protections remain central to regulatory decision-making.
This creates incentives for continuous improvement without relying solely on restrictive measures that may not always address the underlying factors influencing product quality or consumer behaviour.
Looking Ahead
As nicotine regulation continues to evolve, policymakers face an increasingly complex challenge. The question is no longer simply whether individual products should be permitted or prohibited. It is how regulatory systems can consistently protect consumers while remaining adaptable to scientific progress and technological innovation.
For GINN, performance standards represent an important next step in evidence-based nicotine governance. They strengthen regulatory oversight by focusing on measurable product quality, manufacturing consistency, transparency, and continuous improvement rather than relying exclusively on product-specific restrictions.
Ultimately, effective regulation should not be measured solely by the number of products it removes from the market. It should be measured by whether it creates a transparent, accountable, and evidence-based framework capable of protecting public health while encouraging higher standards across the entire nicotine sector.
As governments continue to modernise their nicotine policies, performance standards offer an opportunity to move the conversation beyond product bans and towards a regulatory model built on science, accountability, and long-term public health outcomes.
