GRIP – interventions in GRey-zone online markets for Illicit Puffbars and related tobacco products
The project will design an intervention to address the problem behaviour of the online buying and selling of illicit puff bars and related tobacco and nicotine products.
Puff bars are a disposable type of e-cigarette that appear to be designed to specifically appeal to vulnerable and impressionable children and youths.
Although illegalised in Denmark in 2022, puff bars continue to be widely advertised and available for purchase on social media, specifically on platforms that are most used by children and young adults including Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.
Limited existing research, originating primarily from the US, has shown that the puff bars are designed, marketed and sold with the aim of creating a long-term addiction to nicotine that will be hugely profitable for the illicit market and extremely damaging for future generations.
The project will design an intervention to address the problem behaviour of the online buying and selling of illicit puff bars and related tobacco and nicotine products by answering the following questions:
Where can puff bars be purchased and how? What criminogenic risks do they pose to young people and to wider society? And, importantly, how can these issues be addressed?
The project will thus tackle the identified crisis of the illicit puffbar market by establishing the sociological and economic factors that drive the behaviour of individuals participating in the market for puffbars, specifically considering the rationalisations of both buyers and sellers involved, and identifying the criminogenic risks affecting victims in the local context of tobacco and nicotine products.
More broadly, the project will expose and address the criminogenic dangers presented by overlapping illicit markets, given the opportunities for recruitment of young people and the risk of them entering a cycle of consumption and engagement that may compromise their health and simultaneously encourage them to increase their involvement in criminal activity.
The project’s methodology can be subdivided into five parts:
- Analysis through a netnographic approach of existing online markets, and interviews with its participants (empirical barrier analysis and stakeholder workshop I);
- Identification of potential effective intervention functions (behavioural drivers);
- Ideation of the intervention through the University of Copenhagen’s Lighthouse Innovation Centre;
- Design and feasibility (empirical pre-pilot and stakeholder workshop II); and
- Realisation (stakeholder conference presentation of designs and potential move towards full pilot)
Despite the limited available knowledge, the noted similarity between puffbars and other harmful substances, combined with the illicit nature of the environment surrounding their advertisement, distribution methods, and sale, enable comparisons to be drawn between the potential make-up of the criminal puffbar landscape and other grey-zone markets that are related. Commonalities include the deviant nature of the actors involved and their innovative methods adopted to move the product from buyers to sellers, both online and on the streets.
Existing, ongoing research in these overlapping fields provides detailed knowledge on the shared motivations and rationalisations of sellers engaging in deviant, grey-market activity, of their understanding of the relevant legal frameworks and their loopholes, and of their perceptions and adaptations to risk. Overall, the available knowledge on illicit markets suggests that there are likely two categories of sellers actively participating in the puff bar context in Denmark, the casual and the professional. It is therefore against these two typologies that localised interventions are most needed. The spectrum of these two seller-types, and the main social media platforms through which they target youth victims, are presented below.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search in Name | Search in Title | Search in Phone | |
| Moretti, Alessandro | Postdoc | +4535337791 | |
| Demant, Jakob Johan | Professor | +4535321584 |
Funded by:
GRIP has received a funding from TrygFonden
Project: GRIP – interventions in GRey-zone online markets for Illicit Puffbars and related tobacco products
Period: 2023-2024
Contact
Jakob Demant
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Email: jd@soc.ku.dk
Phone: 35 32 15 84
Mobile: 81 74 20 74