Vaping Has a Campus Problem. Signs Alone Aren't Solving It.

Walk through any Malaysian university today, and you'll find no-vaping signs in the hostels, the corridors, the common areas, and the lecture halls. You'll also find students vaping, just not where the signs are. Car parks, toilet cubicles, stairwells, private rooms, campus gates. The habit hasn't disappeared. It's simply moved out of sight.

That gap between policy and reality is at the heart of a growing public health concern. Despite years of awareness campaigns and institutional rules, vaping among Malaysian university students remains stubbornly persistent, and experts are beginning to argue that the current approach isn't working.

A Problem Hidden in Plain Sight

A systematic review covering nine studies and nearly 3,000 tertiary students from public and private Malaysian institutions between 2022 and 2024 found that e-cigarette use remains widespread across campuses. The findings, published in the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, paint a picture of a habit that has embedded itself into student culture, tolerated, normalised, and largely invisible to university authorities.

Consultant psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist Dr Anne Yee, who is also an adjunct professor at Universiti Malaya's Centre of Addiction Sciences, is direct about what this means. Vaping, she argues, is not a lifestyle choice or a minor act of rebellion. It is nicotine addiction in a newer, more palatable form, and the sweet-smelling clouds drifting through Malaysian campuses deserve to be treated with the same seriousness as the cigarette smoke they replaced.

The appeal is not hard to understand. Students report that vaping feels less harmful than smoking, leaves no telltale smell on clothes, and carries social currency tied to celebrities, influencers, and the kind of digital culture that speaks directly to young people in a language health authorities have been slow to match.

Why Rules Aren't Enough

Malaysia does have a legal framework. The Control of Smoking Products for Public Health Act 2024 is the country's first comprehensive legislation covering both tobacco and vaping products, mandating product registration, restricting advertising, and imposing age-of-sale limits. On paper, it is a significant step forward.

In practice, the gaps are wide. E-cigarettes remain accessible through e-commerce platforms, social media marketplaces, and cross-border supply channels that enforcement has not kept pace with. A National Health and Morbidity Survey conducted in 2019 already documented a sharp rise in e-cigarette use among males aged 15 to 24, and the legislation introduced since has yet to reverse that trend.

Dr Yee argues that enforcement alone was never going to be sufficient. Institutions with the lowest vaping rates, she notes, tend not to be those with the most signs or the strictest rules. They are those where health literacy is genuinely embedded in the student experience, where young people understand what they're inhaling and why it matters, rather than simply being told not to do it.

A Programme Built Differently

Since 2018, a youth-based initiative called HEBAT, which stands for Henti, Elak, Basmi Asap Tembakau, has been quietly doing things differently. Run by the Universiti Malaya Nicotine Addiction Research and Collaborating Group, the programme trains university students to become community health advocates, who then go out and engage younger students in primary and secondary schools across the country.

The approach deliberately sidesteps traditional lectures. Instead, it uses role-plays, games, and digital advocacy strategies, meeting young people on the platforms and in the formats they actually use. To date, nearly 950 tertiary students have been trained, reaching more than 10,000 school-going children nationwide.

Programme lead Dr Nur Amani Ahmad Tajuddin says the results are encouraging. Most students who participate in HEBAT express a desire to stop vaping and seek help from school counsellors afterwards. The difference, she suggests, is credibility when the messenger is a peer rather than an authority figure; the message lands differently.

Dr Yee echoes this, calling for anti-vaping programmes to be designed with input from people who have actually vaped. Lived experience, she argues, makes prevention messages more realistic and harder to dismiss than standard health warnings delivered from the front of a lecture hall.

What Needs to Change

The picture that emerges is of a problem that is neither simple nor close to being solved. Vaping has found its way into Malaysian campus life through a combination of social pressure, clever marketing, easy access, and a genuine belief among young people that it is less dangerous than the alternatives. Dislodging it will require more than signage.

Experts are calling for a coordinated response, tighter enforcement of existing legislation, better access to cessation support, health education woven into academic curricula, and counter-messaging that competes on the same digital terrain the vaping industry already occupies so effectively.

The students breathing in those clouds are not making a fully informed choice. Giving them the tools to make one is not just a public health obligation. It is, arguably, the most basic thing a university education should offer.