Drug laws in Australia are preventing tobacco users from switching to safer forms of nicotine use, particularly through unrealistic vaping laws. Dr John Jiggens writes.
OVER THE PAST five decades, drug policy in Australia has been contested between two main groups: the prohibitionists, who aim to ban social drugs by criminalising users and consumers; and the harm reductionists, practitioners in the field who take a less censorious line on drug use and aim to educate users on how to minimise the harms associated with drug use.
Due to the politicisation of drug policy by war-on-drugs politicians like John Howard and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, prohibitionists dominate state and Commonwealth departments of health, and the few victories of the harm reductionists – such as injecting rooms, pill testing and the legalisation of medical cannabis – are the products of decades of advocacy.
One of the most influential advocates for harm reduction in Australia has been Dr Alex Wodak. Now the tobacco harm advisor to Harm Reduction Australia, Dr Wodak advocates for smoke-free tobacco consumption, such as vapes, as a non-carcinogenic alternative to cigarettes because the major cause of lung cancer in tobacco users is the tar in cigarettes.
Dr Wodak said:
We've got four excellent ways of taking nicotine by smoke-free options. In Australia, we only talk about vaping. In Scandinavia, they talk about Snus. In many parts of the world, they're talking about heated tobacco products and then we've also got nicotine pouches.
New Zealand and the UK have very intelligently had the sense to regulate vaping and their smoking rate has declined and they don't have a black market in either of those countries for vapes, which Australia certainly has, so it's possible to manage this transition much better than Australia has.
Wodak argues that, like other people who use drugs, tobacco users will switch to safer forms of nicotine use, provided that the safer ways of taking drugs are attractive, cheaper and available. And that is what is being sabotaged in Australia due to unrealistic vaping laws, promulgated by the Department of Health.
New federal regulations for the sale of e-cigarettes or vapes came into effect on 1 October 2024. These regulations replaced a previous Health Department model which required vape consumers to get a prescription from their doctors before purchasing vapes. Not surprisingly, this model failed because most vapers ignored it and went to the black market.
Under the current model, vapers are expected to buy their vapes from pharmacists. But this model, too, is experiencing serious problems. According to a recent nationwide survey of 305 Australian pharmacies, led by Dr Colin Mendelsohn, the new Health Department regulations, designed to provide adult smokers with access to low-nicotine vapes through pharmacists, were failing. Ninety-nine per cent of Australian pharmacists were not compliant with the system.
According to Dr Wodak, the survey showed that the system was an abject failure. This is hardly surprising, says Dr Wodak, because pharmacists were not consulted before the system was adopted.
Only 1 per cent of pharmacists stocked the materials that the vapers wanted and the only stock that was permitted by the government regulations were brands that the vapers didn't particularly want.
According to Dr Wodak:
“They were not popular brands and the only three flavours that were permitted were tobacco, mint and menthol, which were amongst the least popular flavours. So, it's no surprise that the pharmacy scheme has been hardly used since it was introduced in October.”
Over 1.7 million people in Australia use vapes and the overwhelming majority of them are relying on the black market, says Dr Wodak. That proportion has probably increased since October, when the new vaping scheme started.
Dr Wodak said:
It's been a miserable failure. We know that the price of vaping stock is falling. In the black market when the price is falling that means that supply is increasing faster than demand.
By any metric, the system is failing. The supply is overwhelmingly by the black market. Prices are falling, and the saddest part of it all for me is that the minister and the police, the political leaders and the health establishment keep saying things repeatedly that they must know are simply not true.
They say that vaping does not help smokers quit when we now know this is not true: vaping does help smokers quit.
They say that vaping causes an epidemic of smoking in young people, the so-called gateway effect. We know the opposite is true — that the more an age group takes up vaping, the faster the fall in smoking. It's the substitution effect. No group takes up vaping as quickly as younger people. Smoking has fallen dramatically in young people.
There's no gateway effect. There's a gateway out of smoking.
The only beneficiaries of these new laws will be the black market and organised crime, says Dr Wodak. Australian tobacco policy and laws are playing into the hands of organised crime.
The spike in the ram-raiding and firebombing of tobacconists is powerful evidence of the overwhelming failure of our policy on tobacco.
In the past year and a half, over 200 fire-bombings and ram-raiding of tobacconist shops, selling black-market vaping supplies, black-market cigarettes and black-market tobacco, have occurred as a consequence of a perfect storm of harmful legislation.
A black market for cigarettes and tobacco resulting from the sky-high taxation for cigarettes in Australia has pushed many into the black market.
Says Dr Wodak:
“Most of the demand for cigarettes and tobacco in Australia is among low-income people, and especially during a cost-of-living crisis, they can't afford to pay $50 or $60 for a packet of 20 cigarettes. So, we have this boom in cigarette and tobacco and vaping black markers and it's a low-risk, high-profit market, compared to the black market for the traditional illicit drugs – heroin, cocaine, amphetamines – which are a much higher risk for the traffickers.”
The result has been a fierce contest, particularly in Victoria, between the rival criminal gangs that are fighting over the control of that trade and the result is the fire-bombing and ram-raiding of tobacco outlets.
Dr Wodak expressed concern:
We've had over 200 in little over 18 months and it's getting worse.
It's a matter of time before someone gets killed through these fire-bombing incidents. There've been three deaths, shooting deaths, that the police attribute to wars between rival criminal gangs fighting over the black market.
More and more, the black market over cigarettes, tobacco and vaping is looking like any other illicit drug market.
Wodak agrees that the current policies of the Commonwealth Department of Health amount to an attempt to prohibit tobacco by stealth. It is a replay of the previous battles between harm reduction pragmatists and the people who are abstentionists and prohibitionists, who don't want any nicotine or tobacco to be used at all, whereas people like himself see tobacco harm reduction as complementing the conventional public health approach to tobacco.
Dr Wodak concludes:
“What we're doing at the moment in Australia with vaping makes no sense whatsoever and is extremely harmful.”
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist currently working in the community newsroom at Bay-FM in Byron Bay.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
Related Articles
- Tobacco industry leaving Indonesia up in smoke
- Government dragging on better ways to help smokers pack it in
