A guy on a stag trip slid up to the bar at Kim’s last week, leaned across the counter, and asked me where he could get shisha after we close. Two of his mates behind him already had their phones out, scrolling Tripadvisor. I put the bar towel down.
This is the third question of its kind I’ve fielded in a fortnight, and I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. Of the three substances Vietnam went after in 2025 – vapes, laughing gas, and shisha – the shisha question is the one I can’t answer with a clean yes or no. Vapes and laughing gas, easy. There’s a decree, there’s a fine, there’s a number on the page. Shisha sits in a different category. The law has technically banned it, the city has been hunting it for over a decade, and there are still shisha lounges open across Saigon as I write this. The murkiness is the story. And the murkiness is where the trouble hides.
Let me walk you through it properly.
Quick – Who Am I?
Before we go any further. I’m Dom – Dominic on the staff roster, Dom to the regulars – and I’ve been pouring drinks at Kim’s Tavern Super Girl Bar on Huynh Thuc Khang Street for the best part of a year. Most of my customers are expat lads and tourists working their way through Saigon, which means I spend my shifts answering exactly the kind of question this article answers. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a consultant. I’m the bartender. But the regulars have been kind enough to leave me a steady run of Google reviews, and I’d rather you trust the guy on the other side of the bar than the bloke who told you about the secret hookah place down the alley.
Right, back to the murky truth.
The Short Answer
Is shisha legal in Vietnam in 2026? Officially, no. Shisha sits inside the same 2025 ban that took out e-cigarettes and laughing gas. The longer, more useful answer is that the user-fine framework for shisha hasn’t been built out the way it has for vapes, the lounges are still trading openly across the city, and the real risk to you as a customer isn’t the smoke coming through the pipe. The real risk is being inside the wrong bar on the wrong night and ending up in a police van that wasn’t supposed to be your problem.
The rest of this article is the murky truth, because the clean lie won’t keep you out of trouble.
What The Law Actually Says
The headline law is Resolution 173/2024/QH15, passed by the National Assembly on 30 November 2024 and in force from 1 January 2025. The wording of the resolution bans the production, trade, import, storage, transport, and use of “e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products, gases, and substances harmful to human health.”
Vape and heated tobacco are named directly. Shisha is not. But Vietnamese state media, the Ministry of Health, and government legal publications have all read shisha into the “addictive substances” wording from day one. Vietnamese-language reporting on the resolution treats shisha as fully banned alongside the rest. The Vietnam News English service covered the rollout of the resolution and made plain it was a public-health package aimed at the full menu of new and addictive nicotine and substance products, not just the obvious two.
The other detail worth knowing: HCMC has been gunning for a shisha ban since 2013. The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee filed a formal petition with the central government over a decade ago, asking for shisha to be added to the prohibited business list. So when the resolution dropped in late 2024, our city was not surprised. We were waiting.
The Decree Gap
Here’s where the picture gets messy. I’m going to be straight with you rather than pretend it’s clean.
The reason the vape post on this site can give you a precise number – 3 to 5 million dong, personal fine, device destroyed – is because Decree 371/2025/ND-CP went live on 31 December 2025. That decree spells out the administrative penalties on individual users. Read it closely and you’ll see it defines and targets electronic cigarettes and heated tobacco products by name. It does not name shisha in its user-fine schedule.
What this means in practice: shisha is officially banned under Resolution 173, but the user-fine equivalent of Decree 371 for shisha specifically has not been published yet. There’s a gap between the headline ban and the personal penalty paperwork that turns the ban into a number on your bill.
Don’t take that gap as a green light. The vape user-fine framework was drafted, debated, and rolled out in just under a year from the ban resolution, so it would be a brave bet to assume the shisha equivalent is far behind. The framework is being built around shisha. The lounges still trading are betting the fines don’t catch up before they’ve made their money.
In the meantime, enforcement comes through other levers. Business licences get revoked. Owners get charged with “trading in banned goods,” which is a criminal matter, not an administrative one. And the big one, the one that matters most to you sitting on a sofa in a shisha bar at 1am: drug raids that sweep up shisha venues as collateral.
What’s Actually Happening On The Ground
Here’s the reality that doesn’t quite match the law.
Shisha lounges are still open in Saigon in 2026. Thao Dien, central District 1, District 7, the streets either side of Bui Vien. Tourist guides and review sites are still publishing “best shisha bars in Saigon” pieces as recently as the weeks before this post went up. From the punter’s-eye view, the scene looks alive.
From the police-blotter view, it looks different.
Through 2024 and 2025, Vietnamese police ran a steady drumbeat of bar raids that should be on every tourist’s reading list. In July 2025, three bars across the wider HCMC area were raided in a single coordinated operation, with 247 people detained for drug-related offences. In a separate HCMC bar raid the same month, 186 patrons tested positive for narcotics on the spot. In July and August 2025, the S Pub laughing gas operation on Bui Vien Street was rolled up, the owner arrested and tens of thousands of canisters seized. Earlier in 2024, the Phuong Lam bar in Tan Phu went down in a major raid where shisha and laughing gas were openly listed on the menu, and drug paraphernalia turned up under every table.
The pattern is plain. Police aren’t kicking down doors looking for guys puffing fruity tobacco out of an ornamental pipe. They’re kicking down doors at venues they suspect of drug activity. And shisha bars are perennially on that suspicion list, partly because of the history, partly because the same venues that quietly sold balloons quietly sold other things, and partly because shisha has been formally tied to drug activity in HCMC’s official policy thinking since the 2013 petition.
The Real Risk To You
This is the section I want you to remember if you remember nothing else from the article.
The risk to a tourist guy in 2026 isn’t “I smoked shisha and got slapped with a 3 million dong fine.” That outcome is theoretically possible but, given the decree gap, hasn’t materialised cleanly in confirmed enforcement yet. The actual risk is this:
You’re inside a venue when the venue gets raided. Shisha lounges sit high on the police radar. Some of them are clean operations selling flavoured tobacco. Some of them are something else with a shisha menu as cover. You as a customer don’t get to inspect the back office before you order, and you don’t get to choose which type of bar you’re in when the door comes through.
When a raid happens, every person in the building gets drug-tested on the spot. Not just the suspicious ones. Everyone. A swab, a urine sample, or both. Foreigners are not exempt. The polite assumption that the embassy will sort it out is something that happens on Monday morning. The raid happens on Saturday night.
You spend the night at the police station at minimum. If anyone in your group is carrying anything, you’re tangled into the investigation, and “I didn’t know my mate had it on him” is not a defence under Vietnamese criminal procedure. It’s a conversation you have through an interpreter at 3am while someone phones your hotel.
The shisha bill, if one ever comes, is rounding error against the rest of it.
This is why the murkiness matters. With vapes and laughing gas, the worst case is a fine and a confiscated device. With shisha, the worst case is being in a room full of police on a Saturday night with your passport in someone else’s hand. Different category of problem entirely.
Why The Authorities Are So Focused On Shisha
Two reasons the Vietnamese state cares more about shisha than the smoke itself suggests.
The first is health. The WHO and Vietnam’s Ministry of Health both cite the same hard data: one hour of shisha approximates the smoke volume of around 100 cigarettes, with nicotine levels roughly 75% higher than ordinary tobacco. The widely-held belief that water filtration makes shisha safer than cigarettes is officially classified as a myth in Vietnamese government communications, and it has been since 2018.
The second reason, the operational one, is drugs. HCMC’s People’s Committee has flagged for over a decade that shisha venues are routinely used to disguise illegal drug use and prostitution. The 2013 petition. The 2024 Phuong Lam raid. The 2025 enforcement push. The 2026 reality. It’s the same continuous policy line, year after year. Shisha bars are treated as drug bars until proven otherwise. The product is suspicious by association.
I’m not making a moral case for or against shisha. I’m bartending in Saigon, and my job is to tell you how the city actually works. The Vietnamese state has decided shisha and trouble are correlated enough that being seen in a shisha bar puts you on the wrong side of police suspicion before you’ve even exhaled.
What You Should Actually Do
My practical advice, from behind the bar, for a 2026 night out in Saigon.
Skip the shisha lounges. Particularly the ones tucked into apartment buildings, the basement ones, the “hidden” ones with the unmarked door and the staircase up to room 101. The hidden ones get raided harder than the visible ones, because the discretion is itself part of the suspicion. If a venue’s main draw is shisha rather than drinks, that’s the venue most exposed to whatever the next round of enforcement looks like.
If you absolutely must sample a shisha night in Saigon in 2026, do it sober, do it early, do not bring anything in your pockets you wouldn’t show a police officer, and do not stay long. The longer you sit in the building, the higher the chance the building is in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I am not a lawyer. I am a bartender who watches this city for a living. The man pouring the drinks sees who walks back through the door the next night and who doesn’t, and that is the data I’m working from when I tell you the safe call is to give shisha a miss this trip.
Come To Kim’s Instead
The only thing getting confiscated at Kim’s Tavern Super Girl Bar is your sobriety, and the only raid is on the Tiger Draft tap between six and nine. Two floors of bar, two pool tables upstairs, a shuffleboard, a sofa lounge, and two full bars so you’re never waiting on a drink. No shisha pipes, no funky balloons, no decree numbers to keep track of. Just a proper drink, a proper game, and a proper night out, served by the prettiest staff on Huynh Thuc Khang Street.
We’re at 20 Huynh Thuc Khang, District 1. Five minutes by Grab from any hotel in the centre, with Bar 22 next door at number 22 if you fancy a hop. Walk in, find a seat, order a beer, leave the legal headaches at the door.
Lots of love from all the girls at Kim’s Tavern Super Girl Bar xoxo
