“Prohibition never works”. Oh really? 150 examples where it does

28 Sunday Jun 2026

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Of all the arguments flung at public health over the 50 years I’ve worked in it, the claim that “everyone knows prohibition doesn’t work” has few rivals on the podium of insults. It’s fraternal twin barb, the odious, interfering “nanny state” epithet, often walks hand-in-glove with the enemies of prohibition.

I got a confused post recently telling me that the illegal tobacco problem in Australia was caused by prohibition which “never works”. Last time I looked, legal tobacco was on sale in every supermarket (except Aldi), corner store, service station, newsagent, tobacconist and many more. So prohibition clearly was not to blame, but anyway … just put it out there anyway!

“Works?”

Those beloved of this meme rarely explain what they mean by “hasn’t worked”. Do they mean that any ban which is ever ignored by even a tiny minority has therefore failed? Or is the only acceptable bar here, one of a ban eradicating eternally every last instance of a problem?

Slavery began to be outlawed in the nineteenth century. It remains legal in Afghanistan under the Taliban with the International Labor Organisation estimating that 50 million live in illegal slavery today around the world. So put your hand up if this mean that the prohibition on slavery has failed and so should now be abandoned.

“Everyone knows” US alcohol prohibition failed

Most claiming that prohibition doesn’t work point to the example of alcohol prohibition in the USA. Alcohol and drugs expert Professor Wayne Hall from the University of Queensland commenced his 2010 (pay-walled) review in Addiction of the lessons to be learned from alcohol prohibition in the USA with “ ‘Everyone knows’ that national alcohol prohibition in the United States between 1920 and 1933 was a quixotic and failed social experiment”.

In his erudite myth-busting review, Hall examined this factoid (unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact) and its implications for policy debates about “bans” on alcohol. He concluded “It is incorrect to claim that the US experience of National Prohibition indicates that prohibition as a means of regulating alcohol is always doomed to failure. Subsequent experience shows that partial prohibitions can produce substantial public health benefits at an acceptable social cost, in the absence of substantial enforcement.”

His review and this piece suggest that prohibition was associated with a number of positive social and economic changes while it lasted, and that the almost universally accepted “fact” that it caused widespread growth in the black market for alcohol and in associated crime and corruption may in fact have been phenomena only documented for a small number of US cities. But most people just know it was an unmitigated failure cross the USA.

Outrage about prohibitions and the nanny state has a long history

Attacks rained down on Edwin Chadwick, the architect of the first Public Health Act in England in 1848. He proposed the first regulatory measures to control overcrowding, drinking water quality, sewage disposal and building standards. After he was sacked for his trouble an editorial in The Times gloated: ‘We prefer to take our chance with cholera and the rest than be bullied into health. There is nothing a man hates so much as being cleansed against his will, or having his floors swept, his walls whitewashed, his pet dung heaps cleared away’. And yet on the 150th anniversary of the Public Health Act a British Medical Journal poll saw his invention of civic hygiene, and all of its regulations, voted as the most significant advance in public health of all time. 

In February 1985, The Age reported that at least three Australian children had been disemboweled in the past two years after sitting on swimming pool skimmer box covers shaped like children’s seats. Before the advent of mandatory shatterproof safety glass for showers, over the years many suffered major lacerations and occasionally died after bathroom accidents.  Before 2008, it was legal for fast buck retailers to sell children’s nightwear that could easily catch fire: many children were hideously burnt and scarred for life. Random breath testing was first introduced in 1976, to the chagrin of the Australian Hotels Association. In NSW it was followed by  “an immediate 90% decline in road deaths, which soon stabilized at a rate approximately 22% lower than the average for the previous six years”.

These are just four of many examples of changes to laws, regulations, mandatory product standards and public awareness campaigns that were introduced following lobbying from health advocates. With these, as with nearly every campaign to  clip the wings of those with the primitive ethics of a cash register, there was protracted resistance.  I was a board member of Choice magazine for 20 years, and lost count of the number of times manufacturers staunchly resisted voluntarily making changes to their dangerous, ineffective or substandard products.

Tim Wilson MP

These bans and brakes on  personal and commercial freedoms  are routinely ridiculed as the interventionist screechings from that reviled harridan, the Nanny State. And the cathedral of the anti-nanny state in Australia has long been the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). One of its early high priests in Australia was Tim Wilson, now Liberal Member for Goldstein, who pumped out an incontinent flow of the doctrine regularly in opinion pages and interviews.

In May 2013, Wilson, Australia’s champion of contemporary pet dung heap rights, railed that “Nanny state critics understand that incremental attacks on our freedom to choose are single steps down a longer road to remove individual choice and responsibility.” He wrote of the “rising groundswell of Australians who are sick of increasing local, state and federal government regulations of their choices”; denied that people like him want to “selfishly put their wants above the safety and happiness of others”; that we should all “learn to manage risk through our choices” and that it is not “the job of government to coddle us from the world’s evils, avoid risk and use taxes, laws and regulations to either steer or direct our behaviour.”

Those like Wilson opposed to state intervention in markets subscribe to often unarticulated social Darwinist values that imply that those with the misfortune to be killed, injured or made chronically ill by their participation in untrammeled marketplaces had it coming to them.    The unregulated marketplace and community is a kind of noble jungle where the fittest survive thanks to their better education and judgment in their consumer choices, their better ability to pay for superior, less dodgy products and to keep up repairs on their cars and homes, and to get employment in work that is not  dangerous or toxic. Children living in poorer housing near busy roads in the leaded petrol era, had only their parents to blame for their lead-lowered IQs: they didn’t have to live there! When a toddler drowned  in a backyard pool before mandatory pool fencing laws, it was the fault of the feckless parents for not being more vigilant, and nothing to with failure of government to mandate the cost of a fence as part of the cost of a pool. When kids ingested lead or other heavy metals from dodgy toys when these were legal, their parents should have just done their homework and not bought them.

Those who can’t keep up find their way into national health statistics where across almost every area of public health, the poor and less educated have higher rates of disease, injury, major disease risk factors and death.

Below is a big list of nanny state coddlings and protections that a then profoundly ignorant Wilson would have said are “rarely supported by credible research”.  I stopped at 150 and could have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the list. We don’t hear much from the IPA and its ilk on any of these because they are all immensely popular, taken-for granted safeguards on our health, safety and quality of life.  Other countries are climbing over themselves to emulate many of these as best practice. Australia is one of the healthiest nations on earth.  The precious freedoms that they “erode” are almost always trivial and the industries that were regulated (with some exceptions like asbestos) reluctantly rolled over and still make money from safer products and procedures. No one cares less that their “choice” to buy leaded petrol has been removed. Only the most rapacious libertarians swoon at the unregulated, let-it-rip free market that would wind back the clock of civil society many decades if unleashed by their ideology.

So a public invitation to the IPA, Pauline Hanson and her ilk: which of these 150 heinous intrusions on people’s freedoms and the right to unbridled commerce have not “worked” and which does it wish to see abolished?

The regulations and laws below sometimes are explicit about prohibitions. But all set out what must happen for the standard to be operational. In doing so, each law, standard and regulation this sets up a prohibition on what would not be met if the standard was breached. So for example, compulsory third party motor vehicle injury insurance prohibits not having this insurance if you are a licensed driver.

150 ways …

  1. Access to pharmaceuticals: Drug regulation and scheduling
  2. Access to health care: Compulsory third party motor vehicle injury insurance
  3. Alcohol control: Minimum legal drinking age law
  4. Alcohol control: Responsible serving of alcohol law
  5. Building standards: Balustrade and railing height regulations 
  6. Building standards: Builders’ licensing requirements
  7. Building standards: Electrician licensing requirements
  8. Building standards: Elevator standards and inspections
  9. Building standards: Building fire safety standards
  10. Building standards: Building for space standards (preventing over-crowding)
  11. Building standards: Mandatory smoke alarms
  12. Building standards: Mandatory swimming pool fences
  13. Building standards: Maximum water  temperature regulation
  14. Building standards: Safety glass standards
  15. Building standards: Swimming pool skimmer box standards
  16. Building standards: Mandatory residual current devices (electricity)
  17. Building standards: Plumber licensing requirements 
  18. Cancer control: Ban on commercial sunbeds
  19. Cancer control: Sunsmart regulations for schools and day care (no hat, no play, shade provision)
  20. Child protection: Background checks for staff working with children
  21.  Child protection: Child pornography laws
  22. Child protection: Mandatory reporting of child protection incidents
  23. Congenital malformation prevention: Folate fortification
  24. Dental health: Fluoridation of water
  25. Disability: Disability parking permits and penalties  
  26. Drug control: Pseudoephidruine pharmacy controls 
  1. Drug regulation: Illicit drug laws  
  2. Environmental health: Backyard burning controls 
  3. Environmental health: Burial standards  
  4. Environmental health: Air quality standards for industrial emissions
  5. Environmental health: Controls on industrial discharges into waterways 
  6. Environmental health: Vehicle emission control standards
  7. Environmental health: Lead in paint banned 
  8. Environmental health: Lead in petrol banned
  9. Environmental health: Legionella controls for cooling towers
  10. Environmental health: Petrol and diesel fuel standards (for emission controls) 
  11. Environmental health: Planning regulations on open space
  12. Environmental health: Recycled water standards for reuse 
  13. Environmental health: Septic tank standards
  14. Environmental health: Sewage discharge standards 
  15. Environmental health: Stormwater discharge
  16. Farm safety: Tractor rollover harm reduction
  17. Fireworks: ban on private use
  18. Food safety: Abattoir standards
  19. Food safety: Food additive labelling 
  20. Food safety: Food allergy labelling
  21. Food safety: Food handling standards
  22. Food safety: Food standards (many)
  23. Food safety:  Genetically modified organisms regulation
  24. Food safety: Pasteurisation of milk
  25. Food safety: Café and restaurant food safety and hygiene standards
  26. Food safety:  Regulation of food storage temperatures
  27. Health promotion: Mandatory physical education on schools
  28. Health promotion: Rights to breastfeed in public places 
  29. Infection control: “blood rule”: in sport
  30. Infection control:  Autoclaving of dental equipment
  31. Infection control:  Bans on public spitting, urination , defecation
  32. Infection control:  Chlorination of water supply
  33. Infection control:  Dog faeces disposal
  34. Infection control:  Drinking water quality standards
  35. Infection control:  Immunisation standards
  36. Infection control:  Infection control standards and protocols in health care
  37. Infection control: Regulation of sex on premises businesses
  38. Infection control:  Mandatory immunization for healthcare workers
  39. Infection control:  Mandatory sewerage and sanitation in urban areas
  40. Infection control:  Notifiable disease laws
  41. Infection control:  Sharps disposal and blood borne virus controls
  42. Infection control:  Skin penetration legislation re hairdressers, dentists, tattooists, body piercing
  43. Infection control:  Veterinary and animal husbandry standards
  44. Infection control:  Water standards in swimming pools
  45. Information control: Advertising standards
  46. Mental health: Mental health scheduling
  47. Occupational safety: Workers’ compensation
  48. Occupational health: Asbestos building ban
  49. Occupational health: Dust standards
  50. Occupational health: Hard hats
  51. Occupational health: Harness standards
  52. Occupational health: Noise standards
  53. Occupational health: Personal protective equipment regulations
  54. Occupational health: Scaffolding standards
  55. Occupational health: Smoke free workplaces
  56. Occuptational health: Asbestos removal standards
  57. Product safety: Condom standards
  58. Product safety: Controls, bans on lead (other heavy metals) used in toys
  59. Product safety: Myriad of standards, bans, recalls etc.
  60. Professional standards: Childcare facilities
  61. Professional standards: Mandatory continuing medical education
  62. Professional standards: Licensing of healthcare facilities
  63. Professional standards: Medical, dental and allied health worker registration
  64. Professional standards: Nursing home regulation
  65. Public amenity: Outdoor noise regulations
  66. Public safety: Agricultural and Industrial chemicals regulation
  67. Public safety: Child resistant cigarette lighters
  68. Public safety: Child resistant medical packaging
  69. Public safety: Design rules for babies’ cots to reduce the risk of asphyxiation
  70. Public safety: Dog and cat licensing
  71. Public safety: Engineering standards for roads, bridges
  72. Public safety: Extraordinary powers under the Public Health Act to deal with emergencies
  73. Public safety: Gun laws
  74. Public safety: Hair dryer standards to prevention bath electrocution
  75. Public safety: Hazard reduction in playgrounds
  76. Public safety: Nightwear for children mandatory standards
  77. Public safety: Pesticides registration and control of use
  78. Public safety: Poisons act
  79. Public safety: Poisons labelling
  80. Public safety: Quarantine Act
  81. Public safety: Reduced ignition propensity cigarettes
  82. Public safety:  Regulations around provision of footpaths
  83. Public safety:  Safety standards fir fitness and leisure equipment
  84. Public safety: Sunglass standards
  85. Public safety: Total fire bans
  86. Public safety: Access to dynamite
  87. Public safety: Toy standards
  88. Radiation control: Carriage and transport of radiated material
  89. Radiation control: Dental x-ray equipment standards
  90. Radiation control: Commercial sun bed bans
  91. Radiation control: Uniformity in the control of radiation use
  92. Road safety: Air bags in cars
  93. Road safety: Bicycle helmet laws
  94. Road safety: Breath alcohol ignition interlock devices for repeat drink drive offenders
  95. Road safety: Double demerit points (driving)
  96. Road safety: Drink and drug driving laws
  97. Road safety: E-bike standards
  98. Road safety: Energy absorbing steering columns
  99. Road safety:  Infant vehicle seat restraint laws
  100. Road safety:  Mandatory motorcycle helmets
  101. Road safety:  Motor cycle helmet standards
  102. Road safety: Motor vehicle design standards
  103. Road safety: Pedestrian crossings
  104. Road safety: Provisional and learner licensing
  105. Road safety: Random breath testing
  106. Road safety: Random drug testing
  107. Road safety: Seat belts in cars, school buses
  108. Road safety: Speed limits
  109. Road safety: Speed limits near schools
  110. Road safety:  Fitness to drive medical assessments
  111. Road safety: Brake light standards on cars
  112. Road safety:  Traffic regulation in general
  113. Road safety:  Vehicle roadworthy inspections
  114. Road safety:  Dedicated bicycle lanes
  115. Tobacco control: Health warnings on tobacco products
  116. Tobacco control: Outlawing “light and mild” descriptors on tobacco
  117. Tobacco control: Plain packaging of tobacco
  118. Tobacco control: Smokefree public transport
  119. Tobacco control: Sales to minors regulations
  120. Tobacco control: Tobacco tax
  121. Tobacco control: Retail display bans
  122. Tobacco control: Strict duty free limits
  123. Violence control: Criminalising domestic violence and coercive control
  124. Violence control: Pepper spray ban everywhere but West Australia

Finally here is a list of 74 specific and categories of goods which are prohibited from import into Australia. It includes laser pointers, flick knives, body armour, chemical weapons, dangerous breeds of dogs, radioactive substances and mace. There are doubtless advocates for free access to all of these.

# This blog is an edited and updated version of my 2013 piece for The Conversation  150 ways in which the nanny state is good for us (read 43,000 times)

“An abominable moral calculation”: how Australia punishes poor smokers and the tragically misunderstood tobacco industry

11 Thursday Jun 2026

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James Martin is a Deakin University criminologist with a modest research track record in the tobacco control field. Of his 44 publications listed in Google Scholar, just five concern tobacco or vaping, with only two of these being published in peer reviewed journals. These five have received all of nine citations, with two being self-cites.

This background is relevant to his recent piece in Michael West Media, where he knits a loose thread between the current criminal tsunami of illegal tobacco and vape sales in Australia, Sweden’s falling smoking rates, Australia’s “punishment” of the tobacco industry, our alleged failure to reduce tobacco use, the failure of law enforcement to stem illicit sales and the heinous cruelty to the disadvantaged he says high tobacco prices cause.

His piece there provides  just one reference to support his assertions.  So let’s walk through how these stand up.

Tobacco control “harms poor smokers”

Martin argues that the Australian government has “abandon[ed] nicotine consumers, disproportionately some of our most vulnerable citizens, to early disease and death – an abominable moral calculation” because of instead of allowing vapes to be sold almost anywhere, it has confined legalised access to vaping through pharmacies to control the open supply of vapes to kids by self-described law-abiding convenience stores, tobacconists and vape shops.

While 2,358 pharmacies have dispensed over-the-counter vapes,  and the government fully subsidises prescribed smoking cessation meds to low income health card holders, the unabated supply of cheap illegal, flavoured vapes by criminals continues to undermine the same potential of pharmacy access that we see year in and out when nearly all of us participate in the 440m annual visits to pharmacies to pick up 331m annual prescribed medicines.

If crime syndicates were also brazenly selling these medicines in every suburb to walk-ins without prescriptions, saving low income customers lots of money, should we applaud their public spirited service to the poor and let them get on with it? Or would we instead applaud swift and serious government effort to close this down and uphold the rule of law? I know what I would do.

And Big Tobacco — apparently the new white knights of health promotion – according to Martin now “grasps that its future, at least in the West, lies in selling nicotine without the smoke.”  This is the same Big Tobacco which a decade on from entering the vaping and smokeless markets, still derives over 80% of its income from cigarettes with not one company setting a date to get out of tobacco.

Global Tobacco Industry Revenue Breakdown

  • Cigarettes: 83% to 88% of global sales
  • Smokeless tobacco: ~11%
  • Cigars: ~2%
  • Other products (e.g., vapes, pouches): ~3%

Company-Specific Financials

  • British American Tobacco (BAT): Reported that combustible products (primarily cigarettes) generated 80% of total global revenue.
  • New Category Products: “Next-generation” items make up 13.3% of BAT’s revenue.
  • Traditional Oral & Other: These account for the remaining 6.7%.

Philip Morris International: 58% of its revenue is still from tobacco

Source: https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-10-tobacco-industry/10-2-the-global-tobacco-manufacturing-industry

Martin’s claims about tobacco control harming low-income groups are also wildly uninformed. This link could have taken him to oceans  of Australian data and graphs showing that, regardless of what definition of disadvantage is used (composite indexes, income, education) disadvantaged Australians have been smoking less in parallel with smoking declines in their more advantaged counterparts, continuously since at least 2001. This is the case for both declining prevalence and reduced cigarettes per day. Here’s just one graph of many that are inconvenient to his argument.

Yes, the lowest levels of disadvantage do have higher smoking rates than those in the highest, but as a criminologist Martin may be ignorant that this observation holds for almost every disease, cause of injury, vital statistic or health related behaviour  (diet, obesity, alcohol etc), not just smoking. Poorer health travels with disadvantage.

And more news for him. It is not just tobacco prices which impact those on low incomes more than their more advantaged counterparts. This happens with every good and service they purchase, a truism in every country in the world where there is not perfect income equality for all people. In other words, everywhere.

In Australia today, there are only  two groups where a majority of people smoke: those with psychosis and those in prison. In every other group, early school leavers, the unemployed, single parents and First Nations people there are more ex-smokers than smokers. Talk of people who, as Martin insists “can’t or won’t stop” smoking, will always struggle to explain why so many millions of these disadvantaged smokers over the years have managed to quit despite their disadvantage.

They regret having started to smoke, have agency to quit (mostly unaided),  and are doing so more and more. Their higher smoking rates are explained far more by decades of higher smoking uptake than by lower quitting rates.

Few laws ever eliminate the problems they were intended to reduce. But we don’t see Martin’s equivalents in road safety calling for reduced penalties for drink driving because they badly sting those on low incomes, or ditching these laws because many continue to be detected over the limit.

We balance the harms to offenders with the declines in road deaths and injuries.

Can there be anything more perverse in public health than believing the poor would benefit by access to  cheap cigarettes which will kill two in three long term users?

Cherry picking in Sweden

Sweden has a low smoking rate (4.8%) and according to Martin, this is all down to the enlightened widespread use of non-combustible nicotine, especially snus. Ergo, Australia need only look to Sweden for the answer, right? Here, Martin is a champion cherry picker when it comes to advancing his argument.  Smokeless tobacco has been freely available in Canada and the US for decades and in both countries, it has low usage despite this open availability. In the USA, 2.6% of adults currently use smokeless tobacco and in Canada, only 0.6% regularly use it.

So do the US and Canada wipe the floor with Australia in reducing smoking given that they both allow open access to smokeless?  Ermmm no. In the US, recent use of any combustible tobacco is 12.6% of adults in 2023-24. And Canada? In 2022 it’s 12.9% for any use in the last 30 days. This compares to 11.1% in Australia in 2022-23. So where’s the dramatic impact in the US and Canada of open access to smokeless tobacco on smoking rates? Why only highlight Sweden?

Sweden was one of the first nations to implement population-wide tobacco control polices like advertising bans, anti-smoking campaigns and health warnings. But clearly there are also cultural reasons why Swedes use smokeless, much in the same way they are unique in taking to surströmming, a famous Swedish fermented herring delicacy. It’s considered one of the world’s most foul-smelling foods, with an overpowering aroma often compared to rotten eggs, sewage and rancid butter. Or like Australians’ passion for vegemite, almost unique in the world.

“Punishing” the tobacco industry

Martin implies that “punishing” the tobacco industry with policies like taxation, plain packaging, and smoking restrictions is somehow a uniquely Australian thing. Is he seriously unaware that the global Framework Convention on Tobacco Control signed by 183 nations, has an entire section (“Article”) devoted to ways of controlling the tobacco industry’s efforts to wreck effective tobacco control? Here’s a report I co-authored for the WHO in 2008, which catalogues the many ways the tobacco industry has sought to defeat, delay, disrupt and dilute effective tobacco control policies. But for Martin, they are apparently now the good guys.

The industry screams loudest about policies that threaten its sales, and the very loudest screams have always been about high tobacco tax. Most people understand what this means, but Martin thinks it’s somehow unseemly and the nice people in Big Tobacco are misunderstood social welfarists leading people away from early deaths.

Here are a few historic examples of the industry screaming about tobacco tax. The tobacco company Philip Morris (Australia) in 1983 said:

… The most certain way to reduce consumption is through price.

Then again in 1985:

… Of all the concerns, there is one – taxation – which alarms us the most. While marketing restrictions and public and passive smoking do depress volume, in our experience taxation depresses it much more severely. Our concern for taxation is, therefore, central to our thinking about smoking and health. It has historically been the area to which we have devoted most resources and for the foreseeable future, I think things will stay that way almost everywhere.

And 1993:

… A high cigarette price, more than any other cigarette attribute, has the most dramatic impact on the share of the quitting population.

In 2011, British American Tobacco’s boss in Australia, David Crow, publicly acknowledged the impact of tobacco tax, telling a Senate committee:

We saw that last year very effectively with the increase in excise. There was a 25% increase in the excise and we saw the volumes go down by about 10.2%; there was about a 10.2% reduction in the industry last year in Australia.  (see here at p xviii)

So if these (and many more like them) do not indicate virulent industry concern about tobacco tax, why has it carried on screaming about tax in the same way for at least 43 years?

Reducing tobacco tax?

Martin has been prominent arguing for the  “obvious” necessity of reverting tobacco excise tax to the halcyon days before illegal tobacco erupted in Australia. In this he and a handful of others are in lockstep with the entire tobacco industry who have chorused that Australia should revert to 2020 tax levels. The table below shows what this would likely do to recommended retail prices for a current budget brand, JPS.

JPS Classic (20s) May-20May-26Difference
Excise per stick (1) $0.94964$1.52829$0.57865
Excise per pack $18.99$30.57$11.57
Manufacturers cost (2) $6.65$8.33$1.69
Wholesale price per pack of 20 (3)$25.64$38.90$13.26
Retailer margin (4) $3.72$4.28$0.56
GST 1/11th of final price (5) $2.94$4.32$1.38
Final price per pack of 20    
Recommended price (listed in wholesale price lists) (3)$32.30$47.50$15.20
(1) ATO tax rates
 
 
(2) Manufacturer cost derived by deducting excise from wholesale cost
(3) Wholesale & Recommended price lists 2020 and  2026
 
(4) Retailer margin is at industry discretion
 
(5) Calculated by dividing the final price by 11
 		    

So today, when a pack of illegal cigarettes can be bought for $7 if you buy a carton, in what universe would price sensitive smokers look at a tax-reduced pack of JPS from Woolies for $32.00 and not continue to immediately walk across the street to buy a pack for $7 in an illegal shop –at less than four times the price?

And that $7 price could even go lower. Cambodia is a high corruption index nation (ranking 158/180 worst in the world). It is also a major transit hub for smuggled tobacco to other destinations. There, a pack of locally taxed cigarettes can be bought for as little as 34c. There is clearly wide scope for the price of illegal cigarettes to go much further south if ever required by ever lower tax drops.

And then there’s the inconvenient problem of Martin’s silence on how it happens that there is also massive illicit tobacco trade in many nations with tobacco tax much lower than Australia’s.

Vaping theology 26: “If Australia allowed vapes to be sold openly, this would lower smoking prevalence and kill illegal tobacco stone dead”

05 Friday Jun 2026

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Photo credit: Lindsay Fox

Vaping advocates eat, live, breathe and rejoice in their nicotine addiction. But in 2024, they lost the political debate on vaping policy when the Australian Senate voted to make vapes only legally accessible through pharmacies.

You could hear their wailing deep into the night. This heinous decision would make accessing vapes hugely difficult, they swore. It was gently pointed out that Australians make 440m annual visits to some 5000 pharmacies, an average of 18 times per year, walking out with  331m subsidised prescriptions.  So onerous that vapers should have to go to such lengths.

They then retorted that the tiny range of allowed flavours were massively unappealing. They’d lost the parliamentary vote, but will never stop insisting that, unlike every inhalable drug in the global pharmacopeia where flavours have never been allowed for safety reasons, it’s just fine with vapes. It’s not OK to inhale flavouring chemicals in lifesaving therapeutics, but it’s quite OK to do that hundreds of times a day when you vape. Makes perfect sense eh?

The two main vaping advocacy groups, the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association (ATHRA) and Legalise Vaping Australia both put up their white flags quietly and shut down. Those remaining are tiny inconsequential echo chambers.

But the recent focus on Australia’s massive illegal tobacco and vape trade has acted like smelling salts to a few punch drunk vaping advocates who were down on the canvas. They are now disporting themselves in new white hero hats holding aloft their messianic vision that the time is now right for the government to repeal its galactic folly on pharmacy-only vape access.

If vapes could be re-liberated from pharmacies and made available through all those highly responsible tobacconists, vape shops and convenience stores (who have never been known to break the law by selling illicit tobacco or selling to kids), many smokers who for the last 12 years have apparently never heard of vapes let alone tried them, would have the tape peeled from their eyes. En masse, they would discard their cheap cigarettes and storm into vape stockists. Smoking prevalence would drop like a stone.

There are a couple of teensy-weensy problems with these wide-eyed fantasies.

First, almost every illegal tobacco shop across the country – and there are thousands — is also stocking illegal vapes and have been doing so for at least four years. The vaping advocates’ dream is already a reality with a huge number of stockists and the cornucopia of flavours they lie awake dreaming of. This being the case, why then haven’t we already seen an avalanche of  smokers switching to vapes? Shouldn’t we be seeing vaping going through the roof already?

Not quite.

Second, there are many countries where the very policies that these fantasists dream of are a reality, for many years. Vapes are freely available in much of Europe, across the USA, in Canada, the UK and New Zealand. And sorry to mention this, illegal tobacco also proliferates.

This being the case, it should be obvious that smoking prevalence in such nations should be embarrassing the socks off Australia, right?

Let’s then take a look at data in a range of countries around the time that Australia’s most recent national data on smoking and vaping was published (the next data will be ready by the end of 2026)

Source

It’s clear that New Zealand is an outlier here: the other comparator regions have similar smoking prevalence, with the Smoking Toolkit Study estimate for England being higher and that for Europe much higher. Similarly striking is Hong Kong: despite banning the sale and public personal possession of vapes, it has just reported a 2025 smoking prevalence of 8.5%, down from 9.1% in 2023.

With highly liberal vape retail access across the past decade occurring as much, if not more, in England, USA and Canada as in New Zealand, and smoking prevalence in all these nations declining, any putative causal generalisation about the downward effect on smoking of liberal versus restricted vape access as in Australia becomes immediately contentious.  If liberal access to vaping sees smoking fall across populations, why are not all liberal access  nations’ smoking rates much lower than Australia’s after at least a decade of widespread use and liberal access?

And then there’s this bell ringer. In nations where data are available, there are 45 nations which have smoking prevalence under 10%. Just one of these nations (New Zealand) has liberal vape access policy. The rest don’t. So much for the vaping theology that vaping is somehow necessary to reducing smoking to rock bottom.

Other blogs in this series

Vaping theology: 1 The Cancer Council Australia takes huge donations from
cigarette retailers. WordPress  30 Jul, 2020

Vaping theology: 2 Tobacco control advocates help Big Tobacco. WordPress 12 Aug, 2020

Vaping theology: 3 Australia’s prescribed vaping model “privileges” Big Tobacco WordPress Feb 15, 2020

Vaping theology: 4 Many in tobacco control do not support open access to vapes because they are just protecting their jobs. WordPress 27 Feb 2021

Vaping theology: 5 I take money from China and Bloomberg to conduct bogus studies. WordPress 6 Mar, 2021

Vaping theology: 6 There’s nicotine in potatoes and tomatoes so should we restrict or ban them too? WordPress 9 Mar, 2021

Vaping theology: 7 Vaping prohibitionists have been punished, hurt, suffered and damaged by Big Tobacco WordPress 2 Jun, 2021

Vaping theology: 8 I hide behind troll account. WordPress 29 Jun, 2021

Vaping theology: 9 “Won’t somebody please think of the children”. WordPress 6 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 10: Almost all young people who vape regularly are already smokers before they tried vaping. WordPress 10 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 11 The sky is about to fall in as nicotine vaping starts to require a prescription in Australia. WordPress 28 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 12 Nicotine is not very addictive WordPress 3 Jan 2022

Vaping theology 13: Kids who try vaping and then start smoking,would have started smoking regardless. WordPress 20 Jan, 2023

Vaping theology 14: Policies that strictly regulate vaping will drive huge
numbers of vapers back to smoking, causing many deaths. WordPress 13 Feb, 2023

Vaping theology 15: The government’s prescription vape access scheme has failed, so let’s regulate and reward illegal sellers for what they’ve been doing. WordPress 27 Mar 2023

Vaping theology 16: “Humans are not rats, so everybody calm down about nicotine being harmful to teenage brains”. WordPress 13 Jul, 2023

Vaping theology 17: “Vaping advocates need to be civil, polite and respectful” … oh wait. WordPress 3 Oct, 2023

Vaping theology 18: Vaping is a fatally disruptive “Kodak moment” for smoking. WordPress Oct 30, 2023

Vaping theology 19: Vaping explosions are rare and those who mention them are hypocrites. WordPress 17 Nov, 2023

Vaping theology 20 : Today’s smokers are hard core nicotine dependent who’ve tried everything and failed – so they need vapes. WordPress 14 Dec, 2023

Vaping theology 21: Australia’s prescription vapes policy failed and saw rises in underage vaping and smoking. WordPress 10 Jan, 2024

Vaping theology 22: “Prohibition has never worked at any point for any other illicit substance”. WordPress 17 Mar 2024

Vaping theology 23: “84% of the Australian public are opposed to the way the government will regulate vapes” WordPress 2 Apr, 2024

Vaping Theology 24: “Tobacco control advocates are responsible for vape retail store fire bombings and murders. WordPress 27 May, 2024

Vaping theology 25: Vaping is as harmless as breathing in stream. So everyone relax. 10 tenets of vaping harm denial.WordPress 10 Mar, 2026

Why the “lower tobacco tax” emperor has no clothes

18 Monday May 2026

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[updated 23 May & 23 Jun 2026. See tailpieces]

Not for the first time, NSW Premier Chris Minns has again called for the Albanese government to make significant cuts to tobacco excise tax. He’s now been joined by Nick Coatsworth, someone whose previous contributions to tobacco control policy are elusive. Cutting tobacco tax has now become an established factoid: a prescription repeated so often by lazy journalists who’ve not done the calculations, opposition commentators and callers to radio stations that it is obviously the solution to Australia’s rampant illegal tobacco trade.

Anyone can see, right, that if the price of tax-paid cigarettes could be reduced to make them competitive with untaxed illegal cigarettes, smokers would walk away from the untaxed cheapies and drive them out of the market.

Chris Minns and other politicians in this chorus are used to overseeing multi-billion dollar state financing involving eye-watering elaborate forecasting and modelling. But when it comes to tobacco tax, basic primary school arithmetic appears beyond them.

When those calling for excise reduction move to the next obvious question of the size of their sensible tax cut, a common level proposed is the 2020 rate, a so-called “sweet spot” which preceded the explosion in illegal selling that commenced shortly after. So if we dropped it to there, that would fix the problem, right?

Let’s do the maths.

Australia’s tobacco tax since March 3 this year has been $1.52829 per stick, so  $30.57 in tax per pack of 20.  In March 2020, excise was $0.94964 or $18.99 per pack. If we take a common fully taxed budget brand now costing $42, this would mean the taxed price would drop by $11.58, the difference between $30.57 and $18.99. So our currently $42 retailed pack would cost $30.42 under this tax-slashed proposal.

Deakin University criminologist James Martin has gone a step further, telling the Singapore Straits Times that Australia should consider ditching tobacco tax altogether. This interesting proposal would place Australia uniquely in the world where no nation or state has zero tobacco tax. Two US tobacco growing states, Kentucky and West Virginia, have very low taxes ($1.10 and $1.20 per pack respectively) and smoking prevalences of 23.6% and 23.8%, levels we’ve not seen in Australia for 35 years.

if the government was to heed Martin’s  tax nostrum tomorrow, a typical taxed budget brand costing $42 would then cost $11.43. So would that do the trick and drive illicits out of business?

In Australia, the price today of an illegal, untaxed pack can be as low as $7 if bought by the carton. So a tax drop to 2020 levels would mean a smoker would fork out $30.57, $23.57 or 3.4 times more than they could buy a cheap $7 illegal pack across the road at their nearest illegal tobacconist.

If the government changed Australia’s name to La La Land and axed all tobacco tax, an illegal untaxed $7 pack would still cost $4.43 less per pack than a legal untaxed pack at $11.43.

On either scenario, no budget conscious smoker would ever consider such reductions remotely attractive while illicit cigarettes were still readily available at far less cost.

And let’s remember that a $7 illegal pack includes margins for retailers, transportation from overseas, warehousing and distribution to the retailers, but clearly packs could sell for even less and still remain highly profitable to the criminal syndicates bringing them in. 

So how much lower could the illegal  price fall? Cambodia is a well-known transit hub for illegal tobacco smuggling. A pack of cigarettes, including local taxes, can be bought there for just 34c. Add margins for illegal retailers, transportation from overseas, warehousing and distribution to the retailers, and there will still be plenty of fat that will allow packs prices to fall far lower than $7.

Globally, there are many examples of nations with very low tobacco tax and very high levels of illicit trade. So if high tobacco tax explains high illicit trade, how is it that so many low taxing countries are awash with black market cigarettes too? Simplistic causal attributions about high tobacco tax clearly hold low generalisable explanatory power about what is a global problem which has often seen the major involvement of established tobacco transnationals.

For decades there have been huge global gaps between official tobacco export and import data. The gaps are explained by large volumes of exports arriving in transit countries where corruption facilitates re-export via illicit trade without any tax being levied.

Australia’s Border Force has intercepted nearly a kilotonne of illegal tobacco  and 4 million vapes since December 2025. Three state governments have closed 260 illegal tobacco shops for a total of 13,000 days in Queensland, NSW has closed 250 for 22,500 days since November 2025, including 10 in Sydney’s Haymarket just last week and South Australia got out of the blocks first with 100 closures between June and November 2025.

These penalties, which can also include massive fines and gaol times, are radically changing the risks and costs of engaging in illicit trade in Australia. No country has zero illicit tobacco trade, but those calling for reduced tax are in knowing or gormless lockstep with Big Tobacco which has routinely lobbied government to lower the tax for years to increase their own margins.

Tailpiece #1 John Menadue’s blog, Pearls and Irritations, republished this blog here on May 19. It caught the eye of the lugubrious vape promoter Dr Alex Wodak who reached into his deep lexicon of nastiness (see an earlier blog here), declaring on his BlueSky feed this garbled rubbish (“rather than argument and big smear” …what???) :

Fresh from a 2025 invited tour of British American Tobacco’s “innovation centre” in Southampton, Wodak recently made a doorstopper submission to the recent Australian Senate Enquiry into illicit tobacco.

Across 21 pages, he helpfully included no less than 17 screenshots from Philip Morris and Altria reports to make his argument that reduced harm products like vapes would lead nations away from smoking, a position identical to that of Big Tobacco companies. You could almost feel the love. Invited study tours of Philip Morris innovation centres can surely not be far off.

Odd then indeed that many nations awash with vaping thanks to liberal access policies have not seen them sweep past Australia’s smoking prevalence rate, as I argued with colleagues here.

Odd then too, that with all the years of all this innovation, British American Tobacco still rakes in 82% of its revenue from combustible tobacco. And no tobacco company – unlike car manfacturers transitioning from fossil fuel powered cars to electric vehicles – has yet to name a date whe they will stop making cigarettes.

Tailpiece #2 On Jun 22, 2026 economist Prof Richard Holden who is the UNSW Vice-Chancellor’s Professor Chief Societal Economist and Director of the Manos Institute for Cognitive Economics wrote in his Financial Review column that “a small cut in [tobacco] excise won’t reverse this trend now that the illicit market is entrenched. Marginal changes to relative prices won’t do the trick. We have to shift the entire equilibrium by rewinding the clock to 2016. The way to do this is to cut the excise to zero.”

This was very odd, because in 2016 tobacco excise was 61 cents per stick or $12.20 a pack — certainly not a zero tax time (we’d need to go back to 1901 for that).

So I emailed, asking him:  

“If all tax was axed, you could buy a pack of (formerly) taxed cigarettes for just over $11. Right now you can buy an illegal pack for $7 if you buy by the carton  (which many do). Do you really think that budget conscious smokers would be happy to pay $4 a pack more? If you look at the prices in supermarkets, competition is seldom more than $1.50/pack between budget brands. But cigarettes sell in Cambodia, a major illicit transit country, for as low as 34c/pack. So criminals have massive wriggle room to drop their local prices here far lower and still remain profitable.”

He replied “In my view, cutting the excise to zero would make legal cigarettes cheaper (in equilibrium) than illicit cigarettes and would thus drive the illicit providers out of the market”. Well that’s easy to say, but how given the large price differential that would still remain, would legal untaxed cigarettes compete with illegal cigarettes?. Trying to understand his reasoning here was why I wrote to him. Simply asserting that it would happen is not good enough if you are trying to make a serious case.

We had further email exchanges in which he avoided addressing my question. When I wrote “Please take a look at what has happened to smoking rates in Australia in the last decade. Prevalence in both adults and kids has never been lower … Australia is on the cusp of ending tobacco use by children” he replied “Consumption is up 40% since 2017. That’s just a fact. How can you say we’re on the cusp of ending smoking?” (I had said that we are on the cusp of ending smoking in children).

I then asked him if he was relying on the recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report on nicotine in wastewater for his 40% statement. I wrote: “Are you talking about wastewater data in saying that?   If so, you do realise that wastewater measures nicotine, not “smoking” and that the surge in vaping, its massive nicotine delivery (you can get 10,000- 50,000 puff vapes) has likely hugely distorted  the picture. There’s also NRT in wastewater. I later discovered on his X account he had made it plain that he thought the wastewater report measured smoking, not nicotine.

The wastewater report states explicitly “it is not possible to discern whether the rise in per capita consumption [of nicotine] reflects a rise in the number of people consuming tobacco and/or existing smokers consuming more.”

He then parried further, asking “You seriously rely on survey data?” and then “I don’t think this is productive. I wish you the best. Please don’t correspond with me any further.” To which I replied “Come on Richard, have a go. You went out on a public limb and I suspect now know you did not think it through. It’s an obvious question I’ve asked you, so what’s the problem in answering or graciously admitting you made a mistake?”

After he closed down our email interaction, I returned to his X account to get some screen shots of my posts to him for this tailpiece, only to find:

I’d made two posts (now removed by his blocking). One was a link to this blog, politely inviting him to explain why he knew better. The second simply noted that the waste water report measured nicotine, not smoking, and that nicotine included tobacco, vapes and nicotine replacement therapy.

But I was “lecturing” him, not questioning him. I am one of those “so-called anti-smoking advocates”, not a researcher for 50 years across a wide range of public health topics.

Prof Holden seems a little thin-skinned.

Rare as rocking horse shit: orphaned tracks not on Spotify

14 Thursday May 2026

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I resisted using Spotify for several years because a major area of my musical passions was in world music, and particularly African and thought there would be slim pickings. I had many hundreds of CDs and LPs and gradually  began digitising them to play on my iPod (remember those?).

After a while I started realising that a large proportion of my soon-to-be-digitised piles were on Spotify. So why was I bothering the slog of digitising? So I kept those that were hard to get or very special to me and sold off the rest. I then proceeded to look for my world and African albums. So many of them were there too.

 I built a list of albums and tracks that I couldn’t find on Spotify, and was able to play them from my account. But other people could not hear them. Each year, my list of “not on Spotify” reduced as entire albums or individual tracks were added.

The list below are those from my playlists which I’ve never found there. Youtube has many of them and I’ve uploaded a few sound files myself. So here we go.

*= highly rated tracks

# soon to be added after uploading

African

Spotify: My Best African: the Motherload List (915 tracks)

50 best Congolese rumba

50 best Senegal

50 best Mali

50 best Nigerian Afrobeat & Juju

50 best West African Highlife

50 best North African

50 best West African

50 best East African

50 best South Africa & Zimbabwe

Les Bantous de la Capitale (1963-9) Tokomisa Congo  Congo

*Basa Basa Soundz (1975): Disturbed Ghana

Moni Bile (1985) Tout Ca C’Est La Vie Cameroon

*Dollar Brand (1975) Soweto is where it’s at  South Africa

*Dollar Brand (1974) Mannenberg is where it’s happening South Africa

*Les Champions du Zaire (1990) Mayalalele  Congo

Les Champions du Zaire (1990) Bon retour Congo

AB Crentsil (1994) Menba bio  + live version Ghana

*AB Crentsil (1984) Odo Ghana

*Ntesa Dalienst (1985) Iza Issa Congo

*Ntesa Dalienst (1985) Rappeles-Toi Congo

*D’gary & Tihe (1996) Miady mafy Madagascar

*George Darko (1983) Odoyewu Ghana

*Dexter Johnson & Super Star et le Dakar (1994) Seul Senegal

*Mory Kante (1997) Djandjon 1 Guinea

Asi Kapela: (198a) Yo yo yo (Congo)

*Ems Pecola & Papa Noel Nedule (2007) Naloba? Nzambe temoin Angola/Congo

*Ems Pecola & Papa Noel Nedule (2007) Baweleli mbongo Angola/Congo

Ems Pecola & Papa Noel Nedule (2007): Objectif 2000 ans Angola/Congo

Ems Pecola & Papa Noel Nedule (2007): Sans a presence Angola/Congo

Ems Pecola & Papa Noel Nedule (2007): Porte a porte Angola/Congo

Ebeneezer Obey (1989) Ose olorum oba/sis ba millionaire lo Nigeria

*Franco et TPOK Jazz (1983) 5 ans ya Fabrice  Congo

Franco et TPOK Jazz (1980) Ambozi ya pambu Congo

*Franco et TPOK Jazz (1981) Mujinga Congo

*Harare Mambos (1980) Kudundere Zimbabwe

Harare Mambos (1980) Mbuya nehanda Zimbabwe

Job’s Combination (1984) Imali Zimbabwe

*Souzy Kasseya (1987) Monsieur Simon + full album The Phenomenal Congo

*Kakai Kilonzo & Les Kilimambogo Brothers (1970s) Mathitu mowe Kenya

Lagbaja (2005) Toun terin Nigeria

Julios Lakau & Orch Mode Success (1981) Tala mbuidi Congo

*Carlyto Lassa (1985) Je deviens malheureuse Congo

*Ismael Lo (1994) Setsinala Senegal

Ismael Lo (1994) Senegambie Senegal

*Baaba Maal (2008) Television Senegal

Green Mamba (1996) Busiku bwanduuma Zambia

*Thomas Mapfumo & Blacks Unlimited (1977) Ngoma yekwedu Zimbabwe

Thomas Mapfumo & Blacks Unlimited  Ndamutswa nengoma (2009)  Zimbabwe

Thomas Mapfumo & Blacks Unlimited (2005) Zvirwere disease Zimbabwe

Thomas Mapfumo & Blacks Unlimited (2005) Kukuvarira Mukati  + live Zimbabwe

*Thomas Mapfumo & Blacks Unlimited Zimbabwe (2005) Mukadzi Wangu Zimbabwe

Thomas Mapfumo & Blacks Unlimited Zimbabwe (2005) Marudzi Nemarudzi Zimbabwe

*Hugh Masekla (1973) Introducing Hedzoleh Sounds (full album) South Africa

*Bumba Massa (1982) Mbanda akoma television Congo

*Tshala Muana (1984) N’galula Congo

*Mikea Nagnaia Reliny (Madagascar)

*Sam Mangwana & African Allstars (1979) Mossesse yokole (fast version) slow version Congo

Patrick Mkwumba & 4 Brothers (1988) Emeriah Zimbabwe

Pierre Moutouari (1986) Telegramme Congo

*Orchestra Baobab (1978) Tante Marie Senegal

*Les Quatres Etoiles (1985) Kabyi Congo

Real Sounds (1987) Wende Zako Zimbawe/Congo

S.E. Rogie (1988) Palm wine music (full album) Sierra Leone

R.U.N.N. Family (1986) Hatichina wekutamba nay Samora Macel tribute Zimbabwe

#Bouba Sacko & Banning Eyre  Tiramakan Mali

Sankomota (1993) Afrika South Africa

Shamba Kahamba (1993) Messages Congo

*Tabu Ley Rochereau (1994) Bituide Congo

Tabu Let Rochereau (1982) Monsieur Molonga Congo

*Tabu Ley Rochereau (1983) Femme d’Auturi  Congo

Tabu Ley Rochereau (1985) Bosangano Congo

*Thione Seck (2000) Rassoul Senegal

*Rigo Starr (1998) Philie Congo

Tarika (1997) Tsy kivy Madagascar

Zaiko Langa Langa (1995) Songa-Fiele  Congo

*Condry Ziqubu Sekunjalo (1990) South Africa

Australian

The Allusions: Gypsy woman (1966)

The Allusions: The dancer (1966)

The Black Diamonds: See the way (1966) – from Lithgow, NSW

*Peter Blakely: Caterina (live version) (1987)

*Peter Blakely: Cattle train (live version) (1987)

*The Cicadas: That’s what I want (1964)

Bryan Davies: I just don’t like to be alone (1965)

The Executives: Sit down I think I love you (1967)

The Executives: My aim is to please you girl (1967)

The Executives: Wander boy (1968)

The Flying Circus: Run, run, run (1969)

The Flying Circus: Silvertown Girl (1971)

The Flying Circus Turn Away (1971)

Freshwater: Satan (1970)

*James Griffin & the Subterraneans (1985) Angel run

The Groove: Soothe me (1968)

Jimmy Hannan: Beach ball (1963)

Heart and Soul: Lazy life (1969)

Barry Humphries: Snow complications (1965)

*Barry Humphries: A nice night’s entertainment (1956)

*Barry Humphries: Sandy Claus (1971)

Barry Humphries: The old Pacific Sea (1965)

Barry Humphries: The migrant hostess (1958)

Bobbie & Laurie Sweet & tender romance (1966)

Russ Kruger: Tallahassee lassie (1966)

#Jeff Lang Bateman’s Bay (live version)

Lloyd’s World: Pinky lamour/Goodbye, goodbye (1968)

*Lloyd’s World: Brass bird (1968)

Mike McClennan: The one I love (1977)

*Moondog: Postcard from Hawaii (1995)

The Morloch Time machine (1966)

The Morloch Hit the road Jack (1966)

Ted Mulray: Julia (1970)

*The Necks: Sex (1988)

Red Onions Jazz Band: One hour compilation (1966) – features Gerry Humphries, singer from the Loved Ones

Doug Parkinson: Dear Prudence (1971)

Doug Parkinson: Something wonderful (1968)

Doug Parkinson I had a dream (1968)

*The Purple Hearts: You can’t sit down (1967)

The Radiators Gravitational pull (1983)

Lynne Randell (NZ) Ciao baby (1967)

*Nadia Reid (NZ): Rise & fall (live) (2011)

*The Renegades: Kahuna (1963)

*Resonets Shorebreak (1963)

Digger Revell & the Denvermen: My little rocker’s turned surfie (1964)

*John Rowles (NZ) If I only had time (1968)

*Kyle Slabb & Huey Benjamin: Jangarra (1999)

Mary-Jo Starr: Passionate kisses (1990)

Somebody’s Image: Hush (1967)

Ian Turpie: The decimal point (1964)

The Throb: Fortune teller (1968)

*Billy Thorpe: Blue day (1964)

*Vanda & Young: Lazy river (1971)

The Vibrants: Something about you baby (1967)

Tony Worsley & the Blue Jays: Talkin’ ‘bout you (1965)

Tony: Worsley & the Blue Jays: Velvet waters (1965)

Miscellaneous

Eleftheria  Arvanitaki Into my arms (Greece)

Babe Ruth (1975) Fascination (USA)

*Little Benny & the Masters (1984)  Who comes to boogie (USA)

Roy Buchanan (1976) OK (Canada)

*Ray Charles (1993) So help me god (USA)

Ray Charles (1993) Love has a mind of its own (USA)

*Charanga Cakewalk (2004) Carmela (USA)

The Chaps (1983) Rawhide Scotland

Shawn Colvin (1995) Viva las Vegas (USA)

Stewart Copeland (1985) Kemba (USA)

James Cotton (1967) Jelly Jelly + full album (USA)

*Creeper Lagoon (2001) Under the tracks (USA)

*Robert Crumb & his Cheap Suit Serenaders (1974) I’m gonna get it (USA)

*Dead Famous People True love leaves no traces (New Zealand)

*Iris Dement (1988) I miss a lot of trains (USA)

Diego el Cigala (2013) romance de la luna tucumana  (Spain)

*Dimitri from Paris (1996) A very stylish girl (France)

*Dimitri from Paris (1996) Free ton style (France)

*Jerry Douglas (1998) For those who’ve gone clear (USA)

*Jerry Douglas (1998) Follow on (USA)

Jerry Douglas (1998) Turkish taffee (USA)

Larkin Poe (2016) Trance (USA)

*Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters (1995) (Live in Europe – Full album) Akos (USA)

*Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters (1995)  (Live in Europe) Blues for Henry USA)

*Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters (1995)  (Live in Europe) Szeren USA)

Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters (1995)  (Live in Europe) Contrition (USA)

*Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters Baby doll blues (USA)

#Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters Still soul searching

#Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters (1996)  Ice cream man  (USA)

Eufa (1993) Somewhere (UK)

Exile (1978) Kiss you all over (USA)

Roberto Fonseca (2007) dime que no (Cuba)

Roberto Fonseca (2007) Suspiro (live) (Cuba)

Roberto Fonseca (2007) Zamazu (Cuba)

Roberto Fonseca (2007) El niejo (Cuba)

Patty Griffin (2004) Useless desires + Live (USA)

Groove Armada (2000) Sir Raymond Mang No 1 (UK)

Butch Hancock  & Marce Lacouture (1985) Yella rose (USA)

Slim Harpo (1968) Rock me baby (USA)

John Hartford (1976) Golden Globe award (USA)

*Ofra Haza (1987) My aching heart (Israel)

*The Headboys (1979) The shape of things to come (USA)

The Honeys (2007) In the sun (USA)

Stan Getz (1979) Street tattoo (UK)

Diana King & Brian McKnight (1997)  When we were kings (USA)

*KD Lang (1990) Any way but here (Canada)

David Lindley (2001) How can a poor man face times and live (USA)

David Lindley (2001) The meatman (USA)

David Lindley (1982) Do you want my job (USA)

David Lindley (1995) Tijuana (USA)

Mighty Grynner (1984) Stingin’ bees + Live (Barbados)

#Daniel Lanois & Malcolm Byrne Waiting for my man (Canada)

Yasmin Levy (2007) Komo la rosa (Israel)

Yasmin Levy (2004) Y Tu Y Yo Subimos Al Cielo (Israel)

Yasmin Levy (2004)  Intentalo Encontrar (Israel)

Andre Manoukian (2008) Inkala (France)

Natalie Merchant (1995) Sympathy for the devil (Canada)

Mighty Avengers (1964) So much in love (UK)

Jim Moray (2006) Nightvisiting (Scotland)

Johnny Otis (1968) Goin’ back to LA (USA)

Johnny Otis (1968) Sittin’ here all alone (USA)

Ozark Mountain Daredevils (1974) It probably always will (USA)

*Ray Petersen (1964) Across the street is a million miles away (USA)

*Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters (2015) Fixin’ to die (UK)

*Red One & Nabil Khyat (2012) Knockin’ on heaven’s door (USA)

Simon Ritchie (1976) (Sid Vicious) Anarchy in the UK (UK)

Bob Rivers (2003) Dirty deeds done with sheep (USA)

The Roaches (1992) Ing (USA)

The Roaches (1992) A dove USA

*Runaway Box Ooh girl (USA)

*Thane Russal & 3 (1966) Security (UK)

*Tony Sheveton (1964) A million drums

*Shriekback (1986) Gunning for the buddah + Live (UK)

Shriekback (1986) Underwater boys (UK)

*Nina Simone (1984) I’m not over you (USA)

*Nina Simone (1984) If you knew

*Soukoue Ko Ou (1983)  New York Ameliore (USA)

Spitting Image (1986) I’ve never met a nice South African (UK)

Maria Tanase (1955-58) Cine lubeste si lasa (Romania)

Town & Country Brothers (1963)  Sandy, Sandy (USA)

Los Van Van (1988) Y que to crees (Cuba)

Louden Wainwright (1997) Primrose Hill (USA)

#WiJaz Quartet (1993) Luo Soberana

Many remain terrified of COVID, but widespread immunity has greatly reduced its severity

11 Monday May 2026

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Our three year old grandson’s day care recently sent an email to all parents saying there’d been a case of COVID in a child. A week earlier, our boy had a rough night with a temperature and a cough.  Panadol syrup calmed him within 30 minutes. By morning he’d rapidly recovered his normal high energy self.

So when the COVID note arrived, we all wondered whether he might have had undiagnosed COVID the week before when he had a 12 hour elevated  temperature. His mum and  four of his grandparents had seen a lot of him up close. So we all tested ourselves, with me being the only one testing negative over 3 rapid antigen tests. All but I experienced minor symptoms lasting a day or two.

Day care is a universally acknowledged cesspool of infection. Between our three children (now in their 40s) and their five offspring, we’ve seen croup, RSV, Coxscackie disease (hand, foot and mouth), stomach bugs, ear infections and innumerable episodes of snotty noses, coughing, sneezing bouts and fleeting temperatures. Occasionally these saw trips deep in the night to hospital outpatients (for bad croup) and visits to GPs where rest, comfort and panadol and were prescribed.

This commonplace history, experienced by nearly all parents, teaches us childhood infections are inevitable and that rushing off to a GP each time is both unrealistic and unnecessary. It has long been understood that  some early childhood infections can promote normal immunological maturation and preventing atopic disease (eczema, asthma, hay fever).

As adults, we use the same decision tree about our own colds with coughs, congestion, muscular aches, and common gut problems. Experience teaches that these are mostly self-limiting unless they persist or are particularly severe. While we often take a day or two off for a bad cold and cancel crowded and close-up interactions, we don’t push the panic buttons that still hover for many about COVID unless there are signs of deadly serious diseases like sepsis and most notifiable diseases (see NSW list here).

But for some, COVID still remains cloaked in a whole different meaning. If you tell someone you have COVID, the experience is often still redolent with the portent that has surrounded diseases at different historic times like bubonic plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, HIV and ebola. Globally, COVID has killed a conservative 7.1 million and infected 780 million since 2019, so this is pretty understandable.

I am in a retirees’ walking group on Fridays and have played tennis on Sunday morning in the fabled Perpetual Wimbledon Qualifiers competition for over 25 years. Both groups have participants in their 60s and 70s, with three in their early 80s. These age groups are at most risk of serious adverse outcomes from COVID infection. Two in my tennis group have chronic conditions and are understandably acutely concerned to minimise exposure to infection.

I heard about my wife’s positive test result about 3 hours into our Friday walk. No one asked me to leave, but I sensed or imagined some anxiety and so caught a train home at the first opportunity. I tested negative when I arrived home, as I did on the next two mornings. I told my tennis group about my and my wife’s status and one of the immuno-suppressed friends said he did not want to risk exposure, regardless of tennis being an open air, non-contact sport. I decided to step down from the game that Sunday to allow him to play. Three players gave me the thumbs up and thank you emojis.

All this stimulated some brushing up on current COVID data and on government recommendations on vaccination, testing and isolation. Here’s a summary of some of the key parameters:

  • The first orders for self-isolation for COVID commenced on March 26, 2020 with COVID notification becoming mandatory from January 2020.
  • From 14 Oct 2022 in NSW, it was no longer mandatory, only recommended,  to self-isolate if you had COVID nor to report a positive test. Most mandatory COVID regulations were repealed at midnight on 30 Nov, 2022 other than those applying in some health and aged care facilities. Many vaccination mandates for health care workers remain (list here)
  • In 2022, there were 3,345,187 cases of COVID notified to NSW Health. In 2023, the total number of notified cases fell to 307,076 (9.2% that in 2022). The first 111 days of 2026 have seen 12,226 cases. Extrapolated out to 365 days, this may see 40,263 cases notified for 2026, 1.2% of that notified in the peak year 2022. NSW Health has not published weekly COVID numbers since 20 October 2023. It states today that the best measures of COVID-19 in the community are admissions to hospital and in sewage monitoring. Much of the fall-off in COVID cases reflected the major drop-off in people testing with rapid antigen kits.
  • As at April, 2024 there had been 24,414 COVID deaths among 11,813,144 national COVID cases  with 2.7% in those aged under 60 and 55% in those over 85.
  • COVID vaccination and previous COVID diagnosis do not reduce the incidence of COVID, but critically, they greatly reduce its severity
  • Young children are at much lower risk from COVID than older adults. Child care services need not notify cases. Parents and staff  “don’t have to self-isolate if [they] have COVID-19, but NSW Health strongly recommend [they] stay home to protect others”.
  • Your child’s centre can’t tell you every time a child or staff member gets COVID. However, they will notify you of results which could be of concern to you and your family.

The dramatic fall in the incidence of COVID is explained by changes in immunity to the virus caused by the hybrid effect of huge numbers having been infected and by mass vaccination. Some 97% of adults have been vaccinated at least once in Australia. In the last 12 months,  1.382m doses of COVID vax were administered in Australia, with 60% of these in those over 65 years, and 30.6% in those over 75. Nearly all of these would be booster shots. The graph below shows the fall off across the  years of the pandemic.

Source

Discussing all this with a friend who is an international infectious diseases epidemiologist, he remarked “I wonder how many of those who want to keep far away from anyone with COVID  or even those living with someone with it, routinely isolate from others in their house and get themselves tested every time they have cold symptoms, because colds and COVID have a lot in common in their early stages. And do they expect or demand all those they live with to do the same? How does all that work out?”  

It’s plain there are some who seem to believe that COVID could be fully eradicated like smallpox, and until that time every precaution should continue to be observed as if serious illness and death were waiting around the next corner

My expert friend’s two clearly rhetorical questions obviate that most of us assume that signs of respiratory issues will be trivial, short-lived and passing.  Sneezing is universal with an estimated 95% of people sneezing up to four times a day. Adults typically have 2-3 colds a year, with children having more. If we isolated and informed those around us every time we had a sore throat, congestion with body pains or sneezed a few times, we might well rarely leave the house if our concerns were mirrored in others.

They also make it clear that as always, risk perception is only tenuously built on full comprehension and perspective on actual risk but far more on heuristic shorthand cognitive biases anchored to pre-existing beliefs and concerns. Our contagion-minimising behaviours are also inevitably confounded by uncertainty prior to any formal diagnosis.

If those who cohabit with someone who has COVID but who are asymptomatic and have tested negative should be nonetheless avoided, then how does this ethically parse differently to those who make their own assessment that precursor symptoms of possible COVID should not be tested, and they should go out in the world with a clear conscience?

COVID is far from gone, but for all but those with compromised health because of advanced age and co-morbidities like immunological vulnerability, it has mostly moved into the pantheon of sicknesses that will visit many of us from time to time, mostly with little consequence. Except for the very frail old, where COVID today still takes to the stage with ‘flu as a cause of death when death from some cause would have very probably happened within months anyway.

Since December 2023 NSW Health’s advice on minimising the likelihood of spreading COVID to people at higher risk from the disease includes:

  • Monitor for symptoms. If you have or develop cold or flu symptoms (runny nose, sore throat, cough, fever), stay home until your symptoms have gone. Wear a mask to protect others if you have symptoms and need to leave home
  • Maintain physical distancing where possible and get together outdoors or in well-ventilated indoor areas.
  • Regularly wash your hands
  • Consider doing a rapid antigen test (RAT) before visiting people at higher risk of severe illness. [my emphasis)

Note here, that the advice emphasises that self-isolation need only occur while symptoms are manifest. This is in spite of NSW Health information elsewhere (dated June 2024) saying that people can still be infectious after symptoms end for up to 10 days and that those with no symptoms can be infectious too.

When we test positive for COVID, we rarely know exactly who we acquired it from. When there are people close to us (family, colleagues friends), the principle of parsimony or Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest explanation is the one most likely. So, yes, our grandson did almost certainly spread it to four in his family. But when a family has an “index case” among them, and with many people positive people today not knowing they are positive and never experiencing any symptoms, it is not sensible to finger someone who has tested positive as the definitive  person who brought it into our homes or workplaces.

The most important take home in all this is that if you are in your final decade or two, you would be very sensible to do all you reasonably can to minimise the chances that you will be badly affected if you do get COVID.

As I prepared to end this post this, I read an excellent blog by an old South Australian colleague, epidemiologist Prof Adrian Esterman now 77, on the same topic. It has reliable, prudent information on what older people should do to reduce their chances of being seriously affected by COVID. Please read it.

My other blogs on COVID

⭐ over 500 reads ⭐⭐ over 1000 reads

⭐Should COVID vaccine refusniks now be restricted and fined. WordPress 19 Dec, 2021

⭐⭐The very best of cartoonists against COVID-19. WordPress 21 Aug, 2021

1 in 7 Australians still plan not to vaccinate: time to erode this with tough campaigning. WordPress 4 Aug, 2021

⭐⭐Should those avoiding AstraZeneca vaccination because of the clotting risk also avoid having an anaesthetic? WordPress Jun, 2021

⭐Eight common excuses for not being COVID-19 vaccinated and what you can say that might help. WordPress 27 May, 2021

⭐With the risks of AstraZeneca blood clots being tiny, what explains COVID19 vaccine hesitancy? WordPress 23 May, 2021

A reverse white feather? Let all who are COVID19 vaccinated wear a badge proclaiming and normalising it. WordPress 21 May, 2021

⭐⭐What should we make of 10 nations suspending the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine rollout WordPress 15 Mar, 2021

Mandating masks rapidly and dramatically increases mask use: before law 7%, after 97%. WordPress 4 Feb 2021

COVID-19 mask laws drove use through the roof. So where are the data we should megaphone across the world? WordPress 2 Feb, 2021

⭐What’s to be done about Van Morrison and Eric Clapton’s anti-lockdown antics? WordPress 19 Jan, 2021.

Imagine a surgeon refusing to wear a mask. Gladys’ refusal to mandate public masks is this writ large WordPress 21 Dec, 2020

⭐⭐What Dr Fauci didn’t write about COVID19, but well could have. WordPress   14 Sep 2020

⭐The ethics of shaming prominent COVID-19 mask opponents. WordPress 26 Jul 2020.

When COVID-19 pandemic gets tough the conference scammers get going. WordPress  25 April, 2020

⭐⭐Indelibly sear this into the national public and political DNA: evidence-based prevention saves many lives so let’s honour our COVID-19 heroes. WordPress Apr 22, 2020

⭐⭐How can we erode self-exempting beliefs about COVID-19 contagion and isolation that might subvert flattening the curve. WordPress Apr 19, 2020.

⭐⭐Home isolation: except for food, medicine and exercise. So why are so many other stores open? WordPress Apr 7, 2020

⭐If self-isolating COVID-19 cases won’t isolate, should they be monitored with GPS wearables? WordPress Mar 10, 2020

Farcical half-pregnant Australian gambling advertising reforms destined for the scrapheap

09 Thursday Apr 2026

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The federal government has announced a set of reforms on gambling advertising that have been universally pilloried by those at the coalface of gambling harm prevention.

It’s not hard to see why. I’ll examine the holes in this malodorous Swiss cheese later. But first, some relevant history.

Half pregnant tobacco control policies: history

Since 1976 Australian governments have long supported total bans on both tobacco advertising and promotion and smoking bans in indoor public spaces and crowded outdoor venues like stadiums and music events.

The total ban on tobacco advertising took a staggering 31 years, from the first bans on smoking in buses, trains and cinemas introduced by NSW transport minister Peter Cox  in 1976, through to bans on indoor workplace smoking in the 1980s, on domestic airlines in 1987, in restaurants in time for the 2000 Olympics, and in the last bastions — pubs and clubs —  from July 1 2007 – nearly 19 years ago.

Once the first smoking ban was implemented, there could be no turning back: if breathing other people’s smoke was harmful on a city bus or train, by what tortured logic could it be safe on an intercity train or plane, or breathing it in across a whole workday in an office? The pub test failed every time it was asked.

The longest and hardest fought bans here came with those in pubs and clubs, Bar staff, arguably the most exposed of all occupations to tobacco smoke, were apparently unlike every other indoor occupation who were protected by smoking bans. This was always going to be indefensible.

The pub and club industry fed us the hilarious compromise for a few years that smoking was banned within a few metres of a bar, but allowed elsewhere. But somebody forgot to tell the smoke to stay put. Cartoonists had a field day.   We saw high-powered exhaust fans proposed that threatened to suck your beer out of the glass; arguments about the birthright of decent Australians to have a smoke with their beer and pie after a hard day’s work (but harming bar staff’s lungs was presumably quite Australian); and as with advertising bans ruining sport and TV profits, endless screaming about economic catasptrophe if you couldn’t smoke in a pub.

Of course, none of this came to pass. Television has not had direct tobacco advertisng revenue since 1976 and smoking has not been allowed in restaurants for 26 years.

When the casino at Barangaroo in Sydney was being built, the O’Farrell Liberal government announced that high roller rooms would be exempt from the smoking ban. I wrote this piece for the Sydney Morning Herald where I sarcastically suggested the government must have obtained research showing that smoke from wealthy high-end gamblers was non-toxic to others. This craziness ended in 2022.

With advertising bans, ads on TV ad radio were the first to go in September 1976 because — as is now being implicitly argued with gambling ads– children watch TV and listen to the radio and would be exposed and stimulated to smoke. But the very same children who saw the very same tobacco ads on billboards, in cinemas, promoting music events or at sporting events were protected by some magic barrier that prevented the ads influencing then there.

Everyone knew this was complete bovine excrement. You can’t be half pregnant so, if ads could influence kids on radio and TV, they obviously could do so anywhere else they saw them. Which was just about everywhere. Politicians had baited their own future traps by conceding ads influenced kids. It was then only a matter of time

So let’s look at the proposed gambling ad reforms

  • Gambling ads will be banned during live sports broadcasts between 6 am and 8:30 pm, with a limit of three ads per hour outside of play

So it’s OK, yes,  for kids staying up late or rising early to watch telecasts of the World Cup football, the Olympics etc and see lots of the same ads that won’t be run in the restricted times? And this never happens. And where’s the data that show up to three ads is benign, while any more are persuasive?

  • Ads will be prohibited from being targeted at children and cannot be broadcast on radio during school drop-off/pick-up times (8-9 am and 3-4 pm).

But radio ads in the school holidays, all weekend and outside these time on weekdays are all just fine? It’s just those deadly influential ones they might hear on the car radio? And any first year cadet in an advertising agency could argue the case that ads shown to appeal to kids were nonetheless not targeted at them. With this truly pathetic provision, the government has learned nothing from the banning of Paul Hogan from Winfield ads in 1980, when Rothmans tried and failed to use this very reasoning.

  • Online gambling ads will be restricted to users over 18, and platforms must offer an opt-out mechanism.

This is a notorious quagmire, as we have seen with many reports of under 16s in Australia being able to use VPN workarounds to access social media they are banned from accessing. And critically here, opt out policies are loved by advertisers, because the alternative (opt in) produce drastically lower traffic. The gambling companies could not believe their luck with this inclusion.

  • Ads must not feature celebrities or professional athletes, and they must include responsible gambling messaging, such as “What’s gambling really costing you?”

Where are these highly fluid class of “celebrities” defined? Will it include the hundreds of vapid come-and-go “influencers”? And what about former athletes? Any suburban solicitor could drive a tank through these porous descriptors.

Australian Labor governments have had strong, world leading appetites for bold tobacco control policy and stood up to powerful industry opposition. Think plain packaging and pharmacy access to vapes. Three in four Australians want gambling ads stopped. This is much higher than support for the 2017 marriage equality plebiscite (61.6%) and even higher than support for more investment in renewable energy (70%).

Banning all gambling advertising would be highly supported by Australians.

Oil crisis sees emergence of new human sub-species: Insufferabilis EVmobilus

02 Thursday Apr 2026

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Human taxonomists have announced the emergence in Australia of a new sub-species of homo sapiens, Insufferabilis EVmobilus. While the species has been sighted since 2010 here and is far more prevalent in Europe and China, what has excited observers is its recent explosion in local numbers and its changing public demeanour in the weeks since the Straits of Hormuz oil crisis began.

In October 2025, some 410,000 of the variant were known to exist in Australia.

In a forthcoming documentary expected from veteran wildlife film maker David Attenborough, wholesale changes have been observed in both the sub-species and in the still dominant general population.

“For years we’ve seen  EV drivers huddled together for solidarity and mutual support in our on-line chatrooms. We’ve been painted as chronic sufferers of the non-disease of range anxiety, cruel jibes about EVs being pretend, characterless cars, and exposing the community  to mobile incendiary devices threatening to start diabolical fires that are the devil to put out” said an EV driver speaking in confidence. “But since the current oil crisis where we see petrol and diesel prices requiring prior clearance from your bank manager, nightly news vision of “no fuel” signs outside servos, queues, and petrol station drive-off theft and siphoning, everything has changed.”

Many EV drivers are today reporting humble approaches from ICE diehards, gently enquiring about our experiences, cost savings, recommendations. It’s a wholly different vibe.

But others are reporting the rapid growth in smug, self-satisfied, insufferable “I told you so” pomposity from the sub-species. “This is often amplified in home battery owners who regale all around them with stories of having turned their homes into all-electric cost savers, homeopathically small power bills, never having to buy petrol and rare and low servicing costs. If you think golf, wine, stock market and vape bores are odious, wait till you get bailed up by a newly evangelical Insufferabilis EVmobilus” another said.

The species is expected to greatly multiply over the next few years, with many ICE car owners seeing their cars drop like stones in resale value with some suffering the indignity of having to sell them for scrap.

See also:

Are Tesla owners simply “supporting the finance arm of the Nazi Party”? WordPress 26 Jan, 2025

Romancing the Tesla 3 and a home battery WordPress 5 Feb, 2022

A stake is driven through the (barely) beating heart of the “lower the tax” lobby to stop illicit tobacco

20 Friday Mar 2026

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At yesterday’s  Illicit Tobacco and E-Cigarette national symposium in Canberra, veteran illicit trade expert Ted Leggett from the UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime told the room in the final session that those at the peak of the global illicit tobacco trade can buy cigarette packs from manufacturers for just US42 cents. Many of these are sourced from Big Tobacco companies  which export in bulk to customers and then wash their hands of any knowledge or responsibility when these products end up in illicit trade.

In Australia, the retail carton price of an illegal untaxed pack is as low as $7 – over 1500%  more than they were first bought for by those at the apex of the trade. Of course, $7 provides cuts for the retailers, transportation from overseas, warehousing costs and distribution to the retailers.  So a single pack price of $10-$15 is common as all get their heads in the trough.

For the last few years, several Australian commentators on the dynamics of Australia’s in-your-face illicit tobacco retailing have been on repeat telling anyone commercially illiterate enough to listen that the way out of the problem needs to be led by a government volte face on tobacco tax. Deakin University criminologist James Martin has been a go-to person for those seduced by how obvious a solution lowering the tax must surely be.

In an earlier blog I listed some of Martin’s  public statements on just how low tax would need to fall. Last November he even suggested to the Singapore Straits Times that tobacco tax might need to be “even eliminated to discourage criminals from operating a black market”.  No country in the world has zero tobacco tax, so that’s quite an out there suggestion, to say the least.

Australia’s current tobacco tax since March 3 2026 has been $1.52829 per stick, or $30.57 per pack of 20.  Martin has suggested lowering the tax to the “sweet spot”  which applied in 2020, around the time that sales of  illicit cigarettes really began booming. In March 2020, excise was $0.94964 or $18.99 a pack.

So if the government was to heed Martin’s “eliminate” tax nostrum tomorrow, a typical budget brand costing $42 would cost $11.43 and if instead they dropped the tax to 2020 levels, the pack cost would be $23.

Given that current price competition for taxed budget band cigarettes is within a $2-3 range (check the price board in any supermarket), the price difference between Martin’s eliminated tax packs and the $7 for illicits you can pay if you buy by the carton, is already way over that, at $4.43. And the reduction to the 2020 sweet spot? A whopping $12 more than $7, a difference that of course would not make a blind bit of difference to the price attractiveness of illicits.

What started all this?

Under the Morrison government (Aug 2018 – May 2022) Health Minister Greg Hunt introduced a bill with two pillars: to make vapes available only through pharmacies, and to outlaw personal and commercial importation of vapes unless these were for the pharmacy trade. In June 2022,  28 Liberal/National backbenchers led by Matt Canavan signed a letter to Prime Minister Morrison which set in train the deliberate gutting of Hunt’s bill. Pharmacy access remained but the import ban lapsed after Morrison presumably caved. This rendered the pharmacy access component a dead duck: why go to a chemist when you could get vapes anywhere?

Vape shops then began mushrooming in plague proportions across the country, with state health authorities rarely raising a finger. With the COVID pandemic declared on March 11, 2020 COVID dominated public health priorities for several years. Understandably, the last thing state governments were going to do amid this crisis was to direct any serious action at illegal vape shops.

Across several years, flagrant illegal retailing with bold signs advertising availability consolidated across Australia. Criminals (by definition) who were supplying this illegal trade collectively thought “no one has done anything to stop us with vapes … so what are we waiting for? Let’s expand and sell illegal, untaxed cigarettes openly too.”

This was compounded by state governments having unfit for purpose legislation that prevented them issuing on-the-spot fines, seizing stock and closing illegal traders instead having to go through long drawn out and expensive legal action. Most states did not require tobacconists to be licensed, so there were no databases on retailers either.

All this has now changed radically as I detailed here. Queensland and South Australia led the way with weapons-grade legislation, with NSW late to the party in 2025 with on-the-spot seizures, closures and eye-watering maximum fines for both individuals and corporations caught selling. Victoria and Western Australia have still to embed their legislation.

Immensely effective regulatory models have long existed in the pharmaceutical, alcohol and firearms retailing areas. Any enterprising criminal who set up high street shops selling prescribed drugs to walk-ins with no prescription, alcohol without a liquor license or firearms to unlicensed shooters would be hit with the proverbial tonne of legal and jail time bricks.

We are a way off emulating those best practices with tobacco sales. There was important discussion at the symposium about the bizarre anomaly that there are some 40,000 tobacco retailers serving less than 10% of the population who now smoke; while there are 7,000 petrol stations for 19 million licensed drivers  and  6,000 pharmacies serving well over 90% of the population want prescribed and other medicines.

Supermarkets have easily the most responsible tobacco sales record when it comes to not selling to  kids. The idea that cigarette sales might only occur there may well be in the wind.

Vaping theology 25: Vaping is as harmless as breathing in steam, so everyone relax! 10 tenets of vaping harm denial.

10 Tuesday Mar 2026

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When you ask vapers why they vape, different answers are typically given by new experimental vapers and those who have been doing it for longer. Curiosity, the attraction of flavours and lower price are often top of mind in novices.  But optimistic harm reduction beliefs are often given by committed vapers.  

The twin pillars of vaping advocacy are that vapes have a risk profile that is as near as you can get to being utterly benign, and that they are peerless as a way of quitting smoking. I’ve looked at the latter argument here.

In this blog I’ll revisit 10 articles of faith about the safety issue.

  1. “Vaping is 95% less dangerous than smoking”

This trite factoid enjoyed massive sunlight for a few years after a 2014 meeting in which it was conjured. I took a close look at its discredited origins in this 2019 blog on the dirty dozen myths about vaping  and again with others in this review in the American Journal of Public Health in 2020. Today it is richly deserved  future museum piece alongside the greatest hits of the hyperbole king of vaping impact, Britain’s David Nutt.

2. Significant levels of vaping have been around now  in Australia for some 10 years. If it was dangerous, where are all the bodies?

Daily vaping rates in Australia  increased sevenfold between 2016-2023 from 0.5% (100,000) in 2016 to 3.5% (700,000 people) in 2022–2023. So there are big numbers out there. Should we therefore be seeing evidence of declining deaths from smoking if so many are vaping these “extraordinarily successful” quit smoking aids?  No. So when might that start being seen?

Smoking-caused chronic diseases like lung and cardiovascular disease and cancer have latency periods between first exposure and  onset of symptoms and formal diagnosis of these diseases. This can vary with age of smoking commencement, duration of smoking and sex. These periods are uncommonly as soon as 15 years but much more likely to be 45+ years.

Current smokers are often diagnosed at a younger age (median ~63y) compared to former smokers (median ~69y). The overall average age for all lung cancer patients (including non-smokers) is typically around 70–72ys. So if smoking commences at ~15, latency periods range from 48-57 years (reference).

If chronic vaping also proves to cause chronic disease, we would not expect to see clear population level evidence of this until around 2050-60.

3. Vaping exposes you to particulates comparable to breathing steam from a kettle in your kitchen

The tobacco industry has decades-long form in trying to trivialise the harms of smoking. This priceless industry  document from 1984 was a 20 page aide memoir for industry spokespeople being interviewed by the media about the harms of smoking. It’s not hard to imagine its genesis: “ok team, I want you to find as many things that can cause any sort of health problem that we can rattle off to interviewers who say smoking is harmful. Long hair, hot soup, hobbies. Find us more!

Thirty five years later, Moira Gilchrist, today Chief Global Communications Officer at Philip Morris International, echoed the same thinking when ridiculing silly people who worry about particulate matter exposure from vapes.

4. Flavour chemicals in vapes are just “food grade” chemicals – so nothing to worry about, folks!

Any toxicology undergraduate understands that the route of exposure or administration of a drug or chemical is fundamental in understanding its risks and benefits.Science journalist  Dr Heather Goldstone  put it beautifully like this (at 11m10to 24m50)

“It doesn’t take someone with an advanced degree in toxicology to understand that drinking water is different than breathing water”.

So swallowing a chemical may present a whole different risk profile to injecting, inhaling or having skin contact with the same chemical. In this blog, I looked at what the peak flavouring and extracts manufacturing association (FEMA)) in the US had to say about inhaling vapourised flavourants.

Here was an industry which earns its fortune from food, beverage and perfume smells and flavours which stood to earn gazillions more if toxicology gave the green light to adding flavourants to vapes. But twice (in 2013 and again in 2020) FEMA red-lighted the entire idea:

This has made zero impression with vaping advocates who cannot see beyond flavours being a major attractant for vaping. That’s the only myopic question they ask in their evangelical zeal.

In this 2020 blog, I examined the obvious question of why  there is no inhalable pharmaceutical product anywhere in the world registered with a government drug regulatory authority which is flavoured. There’s no such thing as flavoured Ventolin (salbutamol)  because flavours are totally unnecessary to the therapeutic action of salbutamol. People with asthma do not sign petitions demanding mango or watermelon flavours in their puffers. But vaping advocates will tell you again and again “nothing to worry about” – go ahead and try any one of these beguiling thousands of flavour chemicals, you suckers. Vaping is sooo important, it’s beyond being tied up in the regulations that all therapeutic goods have to meet.

5. “The liquid excipient propylene glycol used in vape liquid is harmless to breathe”

Nicotine in vapes is mostly infused in liquid propylene glycol (PG), along with nicotine, flavourings and temperature control chemicals. When a vape is inhaled, a metal coil in the vape heats this mixuture to 300o Celsius.

Dow Chemical, a major manufacturer of PG in 2019 explicitly named PG in vaping devices and accessories as a “non-supported application”.  With the vast earnings potential for Dow in embracing PG in vapes, clearly the risk exposure to the company in doing so must have been assessed as massive.

6. Vaping liquids have cooling agent chemicals added to them to mask harshness

It’s not just PG, flavouring chemicals and nicotine that is added to the brew in vapes. University of Wollongong researchers detected  the synthetic cooling agentWS-23  ((N-ethyl-p-menthane-3-carboxamide) in often high concentrations in all disposable vapes they tested. They noted  that cytotoxicity studies have found that concentrations of WS-23 below those observed in e-liquids produced adverse effects in cell viability assays.

7. Heavy metal in your lungs, not just in your ears

Heated metal coils in vapes have been shown to shed micro particicles of heavy metals which are inhaled into the lungs.Korean researchers found e-cigarette users exhibited significantly higher serum concentrations of heavy metals than non-smokers. Lead levels were 10 % higher, mercury levels 13.7 % higher and cadmium levels were 61.4 % higher  Cigarette smokers demonstrated elevated levels of these metals compared to non-smokers, but had generally lower levels than e-cigarette users.

8. Nicotine levels in vapes are not very addictive

Alex Wodak the tireless Australian vape promoter, says hand-on-heart that “vaping is not terribly addictive”. So consider this recent ABC video at 2m50s where a vaper says he goes through one 5000 puff disposable vape every four days and vapes “first thing in the morning and last thing at night” That’s 1,250 deep lung bastings every day. He’s vaped for four years. So that’s 1.825 million puffs pulled deep across the pink lungs of his mouth, throat and lungs across that time. Not terribly addictive. Yeah, right.

In this observational study of vapers allowed to vape ad libitum (ie as much or as little as they liked), for 90 minutes using their own vaping equipment, the median number of puffs taken over 90 minutes was 71 (i.e. 0.79 puffs per minute or 47.3 per hour). If a person vaped for 12 hours a day at that rate (generously allowing 12 hours for sleep and periods of non-vaping), this would translate to 568 puffs across a 12 hour day or 207,462 times in a year.

But in the ABC video we have a current vaper probably using a vape with five-fold higher nicotine dose than earlier generations of vape.

9. “Nicotine in the doses people get from vaping is all but benign”

The sine qua non of smoking is nicotine. Marketing flashes in the pan like nicotine free herbal cigarettes have all been total market failures because smokers smoke to re-dose themselves with nicotine. The industry fiercely resists proposals for mandated nicotine-free cigarettes, from similar concerns.  The industry and its supporters for decades publicly denied nicotine was addictive. After oceans of its internal documents showed this to be an elaborate collusion to stall regulation and reassure the public, it changed its tune.

The chorus then changed to “well yes, it is addictive but its harms have been demonised and besides, it’s pleasurable!”. In 2019 I compiled this selection of research about concerns with nicotinepublished in notable journals including Nature Reviews Cancer, Lancet Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Mol Cancer Res, Critical Reviews in Toxicology, Carcinogenesis, Mutation Research, Int J Cancer, Apoptosis and  Biomedical Reports. These concerns are seldom mentioned by those who recite Michael Russell’s dictum that “People smoke for the nicotine but they die from the tar” as a talisman against any expressed concerns about nicotine.

I’ve also listed numerous recent reviews of the emerging evidence about vaping and precursors of respiratory and cardiovascular disease. This evidence hardly describes an assessment of vaping as a benign practice akin to inhaling steam in a shower or having a couple of cups of coffee a day, analogies we  hear used by vaping advocates.

Vaping cheer leader psychologist  Peter Hajek said in 2013 “Nicotine itself is probably safer than caffeine ….The case for regulating e-cigarettes as a pharmaceutical product is on a par with regulating coffee.”

No nations regulate coffee, while as at 2021, 37 nations had banned vapes and 73 regulated sales. What do they know that old mate Peter doesn’t?

10. Nicotine is “pleasurable”

In this piece in The Conversation, I looked at the nature of the pleasure that smokers claim for smoking. Just as we all get pleasure from the end of a terrible movie when we are finally able to escape from the middle of a row in the cinema, or from codeine when it works to quell a bad toothache, I argued that nicotine’s reputation for pleasure is mostly about each puff subtly relieving the onset of nicotine withdrawal sensations:

“Smokers know from the earliest days of their addiction these feelings can disappear within a few seconds as the nicotine is rapidly transported from their lungs to their brains where dopamine is released and experienced as pleasurable.

Smokers often insist the pleasure from this release can somehow be experienced independently of the pleasures of the nicotine withdrawal symptoms rapidly dissipating.

So what is the “pleasure” being experienced here? When you have a toothache and this is relieved by a strong analgesic, your mood can quickly elevate as the codeine begins to work.

The argument that smoking and inhaling nicotine is “pleasurable” is a bit like saying being beaten up every day is something you want to continue with, because hey, it feels so good when the beating stops for a while.”

Latvian ad for West cigarettes.

Translation: Westo -This shit won’t take it away from me.(ie I’d rather be beaten up than stop smoking West)

Also in this series

Vaping theology: 1 The Cancer Council Australia takes huge donations from
cigarette retailers. WordPress  30 Jul, 2020

Vaping theology: 2 Tobacco control advocates help Big Tobacco. WordPress 12 Aug, 2020

Vaping theology: 3 Australia’s prescribed vaping model “privileges” Big Tobacco WordPress Feb 15, 2020

Vaping theology: 4 Many in tobacco control do not support open access to vapes because they are just protecting their jobs. WordPress 27 Feb 2021

Vaping theology: 5 I take money from China and Bloomberg to conduct bogus studies. WordPress 6 Mar, 2021

Vaping theology: 6 There’s nicotine in potatoes and tomatoes so should we restrict or ban them too? WordPress 9 Mar, 2021

Vaping theology: 7 Vaping prohibitionists have been punished, hurt, suffered and damaged by Big Tobacco WordPress 2 Jun, 2021

Vaping theology: 8 I hide behind troll account. WordPress 29 Jun, 2021

Vaping theology: 9 “Won’t somebody please think of the children”. WordPress 6 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 10: Almost all young people who vape regularly are already smokers before they tried vaping. WordPress 10 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 11 The sky is about to fall in as nicotine vaping starts to require a prescription in Australia. WordPress 28 Sep, 2021

Vaping theology: 12 Nicotine is not very addictive WordPress 3 Jan 2022

Vaping theology 13: Kids who try vaping and then start smoking,would have started smoking regardless. WordPress 20 Jan, 2023

Vaping theology 14: Policies that strictly regulate vaping will drive huge
numbers of vapers back to smoking, causing many deaths. WordPress 13 Feb, 2023

Vaping theology 15: The government’s prescription vape access scheme has failed, so let’s regulate and reward illegal sellers for what they’ve been doing. WordPress 27 Mar 2023

Vaping theology 16: “Humans are not rats, so everybody calm down about nicotine being harmful to teenage brains”. WordPress 13 Jul, 2023

Vaping theology 17: “Vaping advocates need to be civil, polite and respectful” … oh wait. WordPress 3 Oct, 2023

Vaping theology 18: Vaping is a fatally disruptive “Kodak moment” for smoking. WordPress Oct 30, 2023

Vaping theology 19: Vaping explosions are rare and those who mention them are hypocrites. WordPress 17 Nov, 2023

Vaping theology 20 : Today’s smokers are hard core nicotine dependent who’ve tried everything and failed – so they need vapes. WordPress 14 Dec, 2023

Vaping theology 21: Australia’s prescription vapes policy failed and saw rises in underage vaping and smoking. WordPress 10 Jan, 2024

Vaping theology 22: “Prohibition has never worked at any point for any other illicit substance”. WordPress 17 Mar 2024

Vaping theology 23: “84% of the Australian public are opposed to the way the government will regulate vapes” WordPress 2 Apr, 2024

Vaping Theology 24: “Tobacco control advocates are responsible for vape retail store fire bombings and murders. WordPress 27 May, 2024