The boom in fruit flavour cigarettes is driving youth smoking in Latin America—despite the tobacco industry’s promises

While much of the world wrestles with regulations around vapes and their many flavours, Philip Morris International (PMI) and British American Tobacco (BAT) have been pumping flavours into conventional cigarettes and fighting efforts to ban the products throughout Latin America, shows a joint investigation by The Examination and the media outlets Salud Con Lupa (Peru), and LaBot (Chile).

Featuring splashy packaging, breezy names, and flavours that taste like blueberry, apple, or menthol, new varieties of cigarettes—known as click, capsule, or crush ball cigarettes (a capsule is crushed to use them, making a clicking sound)—are soaring in popularity in Latin America (fig 1). Both PMI and BAT have released dozens of new flavour capsule brands in the region in recent years—despite promises to phase out cigarettes in favour of newer nicotine products and vows not to market tobacco in ways that appeal to children.

The two companies dominate the cigarette market in Latin America and promote their brands through tactics such as marketing at music festivals and in launch parties at dance clubs. In Chile, brands such as the berry flavour Lucky Strike Fresh Wild account for 42% of the cigarettes sold in the country, up from less than 2% in 2009, says Euromonitor International. In Peru these brands make up more than half of cigarette sales, and in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico more than one in five sold are click cigarettes.

The products are banned or restricted by the European Union’s 27 member nations, as …