In recent months Alex Wodak, a frequently professed doyen of polite, respectful debate about vaping policy, has ratcheted up his nastiness meter to 11. He’s pointed his finger at the root cause of the gang warfare and growing fire bombings of mostly Victorian shops, as well as  three murders. He says the cause of all this is the galactic folly of the prescription access vape model implemented by the Morrison government from Oct 1, 2021. More precisely, it is various individuals inside and outside government who supported or reported on this model and are playing hard today inside his head (see examples below).

Wodak’s inane and offensive reasoning here is that those who supported former health minister Greg Hunt’s prescription policy would be proud and delighted by these serious crimes and are cheering them on in ghoulish delight at what they have reaped. He apparently seriously believes none of this would be happening had he and his vape promoting mates not failed in their advocacy for open access to vapes via the government classifying them as “consumer products”. This would have allowed them to be sold by (for example) tobacconists and convenience stores, those upstanding stalwarts of public health who of course never sold tobacco to kids across the decades.

Former long-time employee of British American Tobacco and now head honcho at the Australian Association of Convenience Stores (which received tobacco industry support over two decades and has helped industry campaigns) Theo Foukkare, trained his Exocet far more narrowly in  the Herald Sun on May 8 – “Health Minister Mark Butler is solely to blame for Australia’s youth vaping crisis and the rampant black market that he has created, which has already resulted in over 70 firebombings and multiple homicides throughout our communities.”

Someone who knows a thing or two about crime data is a former head of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Prof Don Weatherburn. He called out this puerile garbage recently in an amusing exchange on Twitter:

Wodak and Foukkare both seem to have conveniently forgotten that criminal involvement in tobacco supply in Australia has been going on long before vaping became widespread. And just a reminder that “sell anywhere” tobacco supply is the very model that they both want for vapes. Here’s a small selection of examples:

2005 murder of an illicit tobacco dealer

2008 documentation of crime gangs, illegal tobacco syndicate, of middle eastern origin

2009 Police corruption in tobacco trade

2010 Corrupt dock workers, outlaw motorcycle gangs in smuggling

2011 Three unsolved murders, illicit tobacco 

2014  27 arrests middle eastern crime gangs    

2016 Links ofmiddle eastern crime gangs to funding of Hezbollah

These sprays about the claimed architects of prescription access seem designed to distract
attention away from how it actually happened that illegal vapes flooded the market in Australia in recent years.

In any blame game about the booming illegal vapes trade in Australia, the obvious dramatis
personae with the lead roles are the pots now calling public health and political kettles black. In 2020, a  Liberal National backbench revolt by 28 backbenchers led by the National’s Senator Matt Canavan was responsible for intimidating the Morrison government into destroying one of the two complementary pillars of its health minister Greg Hunt’s policy when it quietly scrapped Hunt’s  ban on vape imports in late 2020. Ten thousand watt green lights were then turned on to light the way for vape importers who instantly figured correctly “why would anyone bother getting a prescription for vapes when you can pick them up almost anywhere?”

To the delight of Big Tobacco, which is unified in implacably opposing prescription access, pulls strings on a seemingly “independent” well-funded campaign and pours funding at the yokels in the National Party, the backbench plotters left the prescription component intact. They then bought front row seats to watch the whole policy collapse, pausing now and then for solemn obligatory statements about how no one wants to see children vape.

Chain-sawing  Greg Hunt’s policy in half and thereby chocking open the floodgates to industrial scale criminal importation of vapes was always going to have the obvious outcome. Sabotaging the import ban left the prescription access pillar bereft of any complementary incentive that would have driven lots of vapers to get a prescription.

“Nicotine free vapes”

Any hesitancy by retailers to sell vaping stock obtained from these importers was then doused by a brilliant deception.  The massive loophole that it remained legal to sell vapes which did not contain nicotine saw millions of vapes flooding Australia mostly in ditzed-up boxes obligingly added by Chinese exporters for their Aussie importing customers. These falsely stated that the vapes did not contain nicotine.  “M’lud! Hand-on-heart, I truly thought I was selling legal, nicotine-free vapes! You’d understand that I don’t do chemical analyses of the groceries I sell to check whether they conform to their labelling either.”

Health Department inspectors were required to submit any seized vaping stock to accredited labs to test if it did indeed contain nicotine. And even if they tested positive for nicotine, a retailer could argue that they had sold them in good faith  as nicotine-free. I was in a meeting in Adelaide in 2023 called by the South Australian Health Minister Chris Picton. A senior Health official there explained that testing each batch of suspect vapes cost thousands of dollars as no mass testing facility was available locally.

The result was that seizures and testing were fatally hamstrung and occurred at homeopathically small rates. Those illegally retailing understood this perfectly well and knew that the probability of them ever being fined was beyond remote. So under-the-counter surreptitious sales morphed into open displays with neon lights outside shops, all in plain sight of kids and legally impotent health inspectors.

Enablers of the vape black market 

So who then were the true enablers of the tsunami of “black market vapes” that turbo-charged around Australia from the beginning of 2021 and the violent criminality that went with it? The 28 Liberal National politicians led by Queensland National Matt Canavan and NSW’s freshly turfed Hollie Hughes are obvious. They  sought  and succeeded in gutting Hunt’s policy from inside the LNP, to the certain delight of their tobacco industry donors.

But who got in their ears? Who were the go-to interest groups who were the consultant architects of the policy rubble that came to pass and  turbo-charged all we are reaping today: skyrocketing increases in current vaping by 14-17 year olds (from 1.8% in 2019 to 9.7% in 2022-23) and fire bombings of retailers, presumably by those intent on maximally cashing in on such growth?

I think we all know the answer here. All those who were implacably opposed to prescription access cosied up to anyone who might help their cause, mostly from the far right of politics. So who is it today who is gloating that their work managed to wreck the prescription vapes model for a few years? Who is it saying “look over there at those who hatched the original policy (but please don’t look at those of us who wrecked it and saw the predictable boom in kids vaping because access was so easy)” And who is so panicked that Mark Butler’s resurrected scheme looks like passing into law with a few sensible amendments clarifying personal vs commercial possession, that they are having daily apoplexy. 

“Cigarettes are sold everywhere, so should be vapes”

A related tenet of vaping theology has received a huge workout in Australia. This is the argument that because cigarettes can be sold literally through any retail outlet which (in most states) has a tobacco retail licence, vapes should enjoy no less freedom of access.

Their argument here runs: (1) cigarettes are more dangerous than e-cigarettes (2) cigarettes have always been sold and are not banned from sale (3) therefore, consistency and coherency demand that e-cigarettes should also be allowed to be sold at very least in the same way because of the precedent established by cigarettes.

This deeply flawed syllogism takes no account of the reasons why cigarettes are sold in the way they are today, and not in the way restricted substances like prescribed drugs are sold to consumers.  Sales of cheap machine-made cigarettes burgeoned from the early twentieth century when there was no case against smoking, beyond that made by temperance groups. Tobacco control commenced more than 60 years later with the first tepid health warnings appearing in the USA in 1966. Across those years, tobacco consolidated its special exceptionalist regulatory status as being entirely exempt from ingredient controls. Even today, fully comprehensive tobacco control has been enacted in only a minority of nations.

To date, no country other than the minnow, isolated nation of Bhutan has ever contemplated banning cigarettes. Yet throughout my 45 year career, it’s been common to hear leaders in this field say “if cigarettes were invented tomorrow, when we know now what we never knew when they first appeared, no nation would allow them to be sold.” Those pointing this out know that no nation will ban cigarettes any day soon. They know the legacy of cigarettes’ historical circumstances saw them (unlike pharmaceuticals, foods, beverages, cosmetics, agricultural, industrial and household chemicals) totally exempted from regulation. They know this historical legacy has tied two hands behind the backs of any thought that backwards time-travel could somehow magically allow this situation to be
undone.

Importantly, they know that when proposing gold standard regulations for any product carrying serious risks, the very last model any regulatory authority would reach for is that which applies now to tobacco regulation. Yet knowing all this, those calling for vapes to enjoy the same open slather access regulations that tobacco does, are happy to set their ethical bar to this lowest imaginable level and accuse supporters of tough regulation as being “incoherent”. We allow cigarettes to be sold everywhere, so therefore we should allow a putative less dangerous cigarette substitute to be subject to the same non-standards of
regulation, they argue.

This reasoning is completely arse-up.

Instead, we should commence our comparison by saying “We made every conceivable error in the way we allowed cigarettes to be allowed into commerce, in the way we allowed it to be advertised, packaged and sold as if it was confectionery. We know that we were deceived by the tobacco industry with the harm reduction false promises of filters and light/mild cigarettes. We now face a new opportunity to get regulation right with new nicotine delivery products carrying unknown risks from daily, long-term use. Let’s learn from the disastrous history of tobacco non-regulation and not make the same mistakes again.”

Governments have banned leaded fuel and paint, asbestos and innumerable examples of dangerous consumer goods, all for health and safety reasons. In Australia and New Zealand pure caffeine was swifty banned from September 2019, following the tragic death of  21 year old Lachlan Foote, the son of friends of mine.  

But vapes are not being banned in Australia, any more than antibiotics and all prescribed drugs are “banned”. Vaping advocates’ trivialisation of nicotine and vaping as a drug and a practice deserving the same regulatory oversight as caffeine is where their rubber meets the road. A huge amount of early evidence is now emerging about particularly the cardiovascular, respiratory and DNA damaging effects of vaping, which as occurs with smoking and asbestos exposure, features latency periods lasting decades before disease is clinically diagnosed.

Lessons from prescription drug access

No one in all this seems to have asked a very obvious question. With there being massive demand for a huge range of (not) “banned” prescribed drugs (315 million PBS  and RPBS prescriptions in 2020-2021), why has the prescription model of drug access been flourishing for many decades  in all but lawless or chaotic nations where you can often pick up almost any drug you want without a prescription?

Why have not Australian “criminal gangs” decided that here was a golden opportunity to supply any of the 925 PBS drugs to people wanting them without the hassle of getting a prescription? Why are we not seeing  pharmacies torched by criminal gangs?

In Australia, there are black markets for products including anabolic steroids, some new and expensive weight-loss drugs and erectile dysfunction drugs. A BBC report details criminal gangs diverting a range of prescribed drugs in England.  Black markets do exist for prescribed drugs but the size of these are a tiny fraction of those which operate via prescription access.

And no one, not even Alex Wodak (see below), wants to see dependence producing drugs available on prescription being sold across the counter in shops. But dependence producing nicotine vapes, full of flavouring and coolant chemicals  never approved by any drug regulatory system anywhere in the world for inhalation? No problem for Wodak: available at your corner store now, right next to the bubble gum.

In this blog series on vaping theologies, I’ll give the last apposite word to Don Weatherburn’s characterisation of Wodak:

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

 

 

Our house is filled with artwork, cloth and knick-knacks we’ve picked up over decades of travel.

I often wonder what I’d take if we chose to downsize to an apartment when zimmer frames make the house too difficult. Here are seven very special pieces that I’ll take to my grave.

Maoist kitsch

I bought this statuette in a Beijing flea market about 20 years ago for $15. These pieces were massively popular during the Maoist cultural revolution in China and now command sometimes high prices from kitsch aficionados.

I took it back securely wrapped in hand luggage where it went to my university office, sitting on my desk for several years.

One day a Chinese student came to see me for feedback on an essay. I saw her look at the figurine and asked her “so who is the man kneeling? Is he someone well known, or is he a particular kind of worker or dissident?” This much seemed obvious.

She looked very awkward and said carefully “It’s no one special … but he’s a professor”

I could not have been more delighted to learn this. Clearly here was someone who might have been me, had I been an academic in Maoist China. The red guard holds aloft Mao’s Little Red Book, the only book worth reading, and stands on his shoulder, publicly humiliating the professor in his re-education.

“So what does the wording on the sign around his neck say?” I asked.

She seemed mortified and looked at the floor. I assured her that I knew it must have been something awful about the professor. She could tell me. I wouldn’t be offended.

After some moments, she sheepishly told me that it said “Academics are parasites on society”.

The fish mouth vase or water jug

This truly bizarre piece was the featured image in the catalogue at a Lawson’s decorative arts and objects auction several years ago.  We’ve had a koi pond for 25 years (photo below), and their beauty has since piqued my interest in fish art and objects. So this item burned into my attention. I won the bid and took it home, to my wife’s horror.

It had a dark residue inside suggesting it had been used to keep flowers in water. I cleaned this out and now use it to pour table water at dinners. A single kanji character on the base told a neighbour who is a fine arts specialist that it’s Japanese.

Senegalese barbershop advertising sign

I’m an Africaphile and have spent hundreds of hours in the African quarters of cities in record and CD shops when these used to be  common. On a trip to New York about 30 years ago, I bought this painting in a small SoHo gallery. I’d seen many of its kind before. They are front-of-shop advertising signs for barber and hairdressing shops in West Africa.

My parents were both hairdressers. They had many magazines in their salon’s waiting area with hundreds of photos of women’s hairstyles that customers could browse for ideas as they waited their turn. So this barbershop art resonated strongly with my childhood.

This one is one of the best examples I’ve seen, among many that are far more naïve in the quality of the art (see large selection here). I have a book in French  Ici bon coiffeur by  Jean-Marie Lerat (1992) which shows examples from most West African nations.

Beatles drawing

On the same New York trip when I found the barbershop ad, I found this ink drawing being sold by a wizened up old man, selling his work from a square card table on the footpath, again in SoHo. As the Beatles audition, a slovenly record executive asks “What else do you do?” I thought it was perfectly witty and paid something ridiculously small like $20 for it.

I  noticed it was signed “Tuli”. In my teens I’d been a huge fan of the New York beat poets rock band The Fugs . Named as a nod to Norman Mailer’s book The naked and the dead where he substituted “fug” for “fuck” to taunt puritanical censorship policies of the time, their most famous song was the salacious Boobs a Lot. I loved the driving Group Grope off their second album too. Country town Simon thought they were just cooler than. Tuli Kupferberg was a core Fugs member.

So I said to him “Are you Tuli Kupferberg, by any chance?” and knock me over, he was! He was delighted to be recognised. We chatted excitedly for 20 minutes or so and he invited me to his place that evening with the promise of illicit experiences. I gave my excuses. He died in 2010 at 86. The sex, drugs and roll n’ roll didn’t cut him short.

Our original Modigliani

Wandering one morning in Ho Chi Minh city years back, we saw a labyrinthine art shop with several artists inside painting portraits  from photographs and copies of famous paintings from books.

And then we saw it. A clearly original Amedeo Modigliani. In fact, a painting so famous that it graces the cover of  the Taschen collection by  Doris Kyrstof  (see below). And here it was in front of us, with the shop owner clearly unaware of its immense value. After a lengthy tea ceremony, we shook hands on $40. We’re sending it to Southeby’s  next year.

We also bought a Van Gough haystacks original.

Turkish shop dioramas

I’ve been to Turkey several times since the early 1970s. Istanbul should be on every traveller’s bucket list. One day in 2014, walking on the shore of the Bosphorus after a night singing on a marriage boat, I found a small shop selling intricate diaoramas of old Turkish shop fronts. There were many to choose from, all about $120. I bought two and on return visits have bought more. Pictured (top to bottom) are  a general grocery shop, a fish monger, a bakery and a fruit and vegetable shop.

These miniatures transport me back to childhood nativity, military and historical diaoramas that fascinated me and which I crudely constructed in shoeboxes with toy soldiers, knights and cowboys.

Reg Mombassa tunes up

When COVID restrictions in Sydney lifted after months of us being cooped up, it was announced that we could have a maximum of 20 people at home, in addition to those living there.

A tennis mate, Dizzy, called me and said that in celebration, he wanted to host a pay-to-come house concert to raise money for a charity in Indigenous housing. His contribution would be to pay for the musos. Did I know how to contact Dog Trumpet? I did, and gave him the details. Pete and Reg jumped at the idea.

So on a Saturday night in Dizzy and Margot’s amazing renovation of the upstairs of a Balmain shop, 20 guests joined them for a two set gig in the living room. Another friend, the photo gallery owner Phillip Bell came along too. He took the stunning photo below and sold it to me at mate’s rates.

I always think of Vermeer when I take it in.

The central bottom right window pane, you can see Reg Mombassa tuning up before the start. Everyone was mesmerised by their sheer, original talent and easy presence throughout the best of nights. If you don’t know their work, here are two of my favourite pieces. Buttons undone and Bored wife.

The report of the Senate Inquiry into the regulation of vapes has been published. It will inform the debate in the Senate scheduled for the June sitting.

The Greens will play a pivotal role in the outcome of the vote. In the report, their concerns are well expressed – particularly when it comes to the detail of how we can be assured that possession of vapes is not criminalised – only commercial supply and sales outside of that which will be dispensed to those with prescriptions will be hit with huge deterrent fines.  No one. No one wants users to be prosecuted, fined or otherwise criminalised. The only exception should be where people ignore no smoking or vaping regulations, as has long been the case with smoking. Every airline in the world bans vaping.

The Bill does not ban or prohibit vapes

But the Greens are apparently exercised about “prohibition”. As a section of the Senate report states:

This concern is very easily addressed.  The Bill does not ban or prohibit vapes. They will be available to anyone who has a doctor’s prescription and obtainable from a pharmacy. To say that vapes are “banned” or “prohibited” is therefore like saying Australia bans all prescription drugs. If anyone were to say straight-faced that in Australia, antibiotics and the pill are “banned” because they require a prescription, we would know we were dealing with someone with some bizarre agenda. Yet this is the routine way in which extremist vaping advocates speak about current vaping policy.

Whenever I need a repeat prescription for one of the two life-saving drugs I have used for over 20 years, I contact my GP via a prescription renewal app and pick up several months supply at my local pharmacy. On a scale of life’s many inconveniences, I’d rank it way below trying to contact a human at a bank, a telco or utility provider, arranging travel or voting. A very first world problem.

Getting a prescription vape is no different the way we deal with other drugs of dependence. Methadone and buprenorphine are prescribed harm reduction drugs for those with opiate dependence. They  are not sold in convenience stores or bong shops. They are most commonly dispensed  at pharmacies. It’s the same with the very good analgesic codeine: it’s available on prescription to those who need it. These are not “banned”.

Before February 2018, low-dose codeine was available across-the-counter in Australia in a variety of medications. Following accumulating evidence of abuse, it was then rescheduled to prescription-only access. A wastewater evaluation found codeine use dropped 37% across Australia between 2016 and 2019. Many who were using it who did not need to, stopped using it when access was limited. This was harm reduction in action.

So where were the howls of protest at this heinous blow to the freedom for anyone to use as much codeine as they like?

Vape crusader Alex Wodak is adamant: he’s highly supportive of prescription access to regulated drugs. But he’s apoplectic about vapes being treated the same way.

Concerns were also raised in the Senate enquiry about vapers living in small country towns or isolated rural addresses. How would they access legal prescribed vapes when there was no pharmacy anywhere near where they lived, but there were general stores or petrol stations who could stock vapes?

The answer of course, is that people living in such isolation nearly all use all manner of prescribed drugs too. Doctors do online consultations and pharmacies have long dispensed via mail or courier services. This concern is nothing but rural solidarity posturing which doesn’t survive even cursory interrogation.

Why is there no significant black market in prescribed drugs?

No one in all this seems to have asked a very obvious question. With there being massive demand for a huge range of (not) “banned” prescribed drugs (315 million PBS  and RPBS prescriptions in 2020-2021), why has the prescription model of drug access been flourishing for many decades  in all but lawless or chaotic nations where you can often pick up almost any drug you want without a prescription?

Why have not Australian “criminal gangs” decided that here was a golden opportunity to supply any of the 925 PBS drugs to people wanting them without the hassle of getting a prescription? Why are we not seeing  pharmacies torched by criminal gangs?

There are black markets for some weight loss and male sexual dysfunction drugs and anabolic steroids for men anxious about their muscles. But these are the few exceptions that prove the rule: Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration is second to none in world in assuring public access to safe and efficacious drugs, highly subsidised in the case of 925 PBS approved drugs.

Some wet-behind-the-ears contributors have backed a compromise: scheduling vapes as pharmacy-only, but over-the-counter. This would simply hand the same gold pass to vapes that exists now to kids and non-smoking “recreational” vapers. Right now they can front hundreds, perhaps thousands of retail vape shops and online retailers and easily get vapes.

But with no prescription required, any street smart kid will be able to do what kids have long done with cigarettes: with cash ready, ask an older friend or an adult outside a pharmacy to go inside and buy them vapes, Over 18 recreational vapers will just waltz in and buy them.

But critically, this step would also set a dangerous precedent. It would signal that our parliament thinks it’s OK for it to do the job that the TGA’s expertise has been established to do. If they can dictate scheduling for vapes, why stop there? Why not tell the TGA how to schedule any drug that a bunch of politicians with the balance of power thinks should be made more freely available or in other scenarios made unavailable (eg; the morning after pill)

If the Greens vote to tear the prescription access heart out of the Butler bill, they will have carried on the legacy of this bunch of 28 Liberal and National Party backbench political vandals who knee-capped Greg Hunt’s  2022 import ban on vapes, dooming the crippled model to failure by letting cheap, flavoured kid-friendly vapes flood in. They will have helped the Big Tobacco funded Nationals ($340,000 in the last decade from Philip Morris, and $55,000 recently from British American Tobacco), with their ragbag of fellow travellers like Ralph Babet, One Nation and Tammy Tyrell – to have their way.

We’d expect nothing less from that lot, but many of us expect far, far more from the Greens.

If the Greens throw their lot in with this rabble and the Australian Association of Convenience Stores, also partly funded by Big Tobacco, they will have made a statement that retailers which have brazenly broken the law over the past years should now be rewarded by being anointed as official newly-minted, government-approved  vape retailers.

“Convenience stores and vape shops: not the problem, the solution!

Those like Wodak advocating for vapes to be sold as “consumer products” by licenced retailers constantly refer to the proliferation of vapes as being supplied by “criminals”. But 2022-23 data on where  vapers obtain their vapes, show that 56.5% bought their NVPs from ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers (tobacconists, vape shops, convenience stores, service stations etc). With children, 15.6% buy from shops, with 77.8% obtaining them from family or friends, many of whom bought them from shops too.

This “criminals” language is designed to imply that those knowingly selling illegal NVP products alongside ordinary grocery items are somehow not criminal but respectable, law-abiding, folksy small business people. But the NVPs are supplied to retailers who knowingly sell them illegally by the very bulk importing criminals vaping advocates want us to keep front-of-mind. They act as fences for criminal importers.

Today, the vested interests which loathe and despise the prescription scheme are now in full blown panic mode that they are about to lose their lucrative brazen illegal trade.  They have decided their best bet is to inhabit the caring, concerned, faux outraged narrative of how terrible it is that kids can so easily buy vapes from the heinous ‘black market’: vapes that are dangerous to kids because they might come from seedy ‘bathtub and kitchen sink’ chemical workshops in China! Not like the nice clean vapes often made by Big Tobacco that we can provide. Like their cigarettes, these don’t cause health problems. Oh wait …

They have tried to characterise the evil black market as those retailers who have been selling illegal vapes, including to children, whom they contrast with legitimate, law-abiding retailers who would no sooner sell vapes to children that sell their grandmothers for pet food. They are now jostling to stand sanctimoniously in the front line of reform advocacy which would see any retailer who puts their hand up to be a “licensed vape retailer” able to sell.

Holding loud hailers, they chorus “the prescription model has been a huge failure! It’s now time to properly regulate vapes as a legitimate consumer good and let it be sold  … well, everywhere by responsible retailers just like us.”

The sheer, galactic gall in all of this is, of course, that many of these “we’re here to help” retailers have been openly breaking the law for years. They now want everyone to have massive amnesia about all this and see convenience stores as not the problem, but the solution. They have openly broken the law at industrial levels but are now wanting governments to believe that there could be no better candidates for responsible, law-abiding vape retailing than them. We would just never sell to children, they chorus.

China vape exports drying up fast

Last week, March data on Chinese vape exports to Australia were released. Nearly all vapes entering in Australia are from China, which in  May 2022 decreed that all vape exporters must comply with the laws on vaping trade in the destination countries.  As we saw in January and February,  exports to Australia in March were at rock bottom, compared with the record exports reported in November and December 2023. These were supplying retail stockpiles, which are already dwindling as shown by the number of  “sold out” signs in Australian on-line vape retailers.

If the Greens act responsibly and support the Senate Bill, their action will resonate with a huge majority of Australians who support tough government action on vaping. This level of support puts support for many high profile  social issues in the shade. For example, the 2017 national plebiscite on marriage equality saw 61.7% vote yes. Two thirds of Australians want the government to do more on climate change. In 2022, two in three believed junk food advertising in children’s viewing times should be banned and 70% believe that gambling ads on TV should be banned.  But support for tough restrictions on promotion and sale of vaping products is running between 78% and 86%.

Support is particularly high in young people, the heartland of Green voting. Cancer Council supported research shows 84% of young Australians support or do not oppose the removal of vapes from retail stores.