The roll call of groups promoting vaping in Australia which have slipped quietly into oblivion is impressive. We’ve seen Legalise Vaping Australia, the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, the Public Health Alliance, the Australian Vaping Association, the Vaping Association of Australia  and that household name, the Australian Smokefree Alternative Consumers Association all come and go not with a bang, but with whimpers.

Far right politicians including Hollie (“What is Big Tobacco”) Hughes, Cory Bernardi and Barnaby Joyce (all who have jumped to One Nation), David Leyonhjelm, Eric Abetz, Tim Wilson, James Paterson, and Ross Cadel and Matt Canavan both from the Philip Morris-funded National Party have all carried flags for vaping, but none have kicked any policy goals.

Every policy but one they fought for blustered away, then crashed and burned. Their sole victory saw some of them pile on to a backbench revolt against a proposal by Liberal Health Minister Greg Hunt to ban personal imports of vapes and liquid nicotine. With that ban in the legislative bin, under the cover of the pandemic when all health department hands were on deck with COVID, criminals seized their moment and the mushrooming of shops selling illegal vapes rapidly turned into a tsunami of cheap smuggled cigarettes openly on sale across the country.

When the history of how the illegal sales tidal wave happened, the 28 signatories to this letter and their urgers in vaping advocacy will be key exhibits for the disaster that unfolded.

Can I be your leader?

Around 2016 Queensland-based Pippa Starr (pictured above) began posting about her journey with vapes with the fervour of a religious convert. Starr held ambitions to be a spokesperson for Australians wanting to liberalise vaping access. And with the above exodus of the other minnows, there were few standing in her way, but possibly even fewer reading her posts (see follower data at the end of the blog).

Starr is a prolific social media user and she wants us to know that her antennae are set on red alert for defamation. She warns she just won’t stand for it.

But, hey, can she dish it out. Here are three examples.

1 I “lied under oath” to a Senate enquiry

On 19 November 2020, I gave evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Tobacco Harm Reduction, chaired by the unabashed vaping promoter, Liberal NSW Senator Hollie Hughes, since dumped by the Liberals from a winnable ballot spot and now found a new political home in One Nation.

At one point Hughes asked me out of nowhere “Professor Chapman, were you on the board of the Cancer Council in 2013?” Perplexed, I answered “No, I don’t think I was.” (I was on the board from 1997-2006). She appeared to be reading from her phone as she asked the question.

After giving evidence, I found the tweet below posted by Starr.

I emailed Starr explaining that there was not a syllable of what she had tweeted that was correct and demanding she retract, apologise and pin the apology to her twitter feed for 12 months. She rapidly agreed and pinned the apology to her feed the next day where it remained for a year.

I block her on my Twitter feed as we do with persistent pests who door knock or make unsolicited calls, but others sometimes sent me her work. Some seven months after the pinned apology expired, I saw more of her vile bile, this time accusing me of hiding behind a fake Twitter account.

That doyen of polite, respectful, evidence-based debate on vaping, Alex Wodak, didn’t hesitate and rushed in, copying her rubbish to five in his echo chamber, just knowing it must be true. I took a forensic look at this idiocy in an earlier blog.

2 Crooks in suits

On 7 Aug, 2025 Starr tweeted  the post below, calling Professor Mike Daube and I “crooks in suits”, thus somehow being involved in illegal activity. The obvious imputation was that we figuratively plugged our ears with money we earned from this activity so as to not hear cries from “the hungry and the ill” whose conditions are the result of our illegal activity. Moreover, we are “rich” partly as a result of this illegal activity and we celebrate our illegal earnings with champagne and avoid considering the lives of people who are hungry and ill, presumably partly as a consequence of the alleged illegal activities we perform.

On reading this bilge, lawyer friends immediately said “how much do you want?”. We decided to add it to a dossier of abuse that ranged from the juvenile name-calling (“chiming Slapman”) to openly defamatory remarks. It would keep.

3 I’m an anonymous firebomber

A year later, she was off the leash again. This time I (apparently along with friends) was an anonymous firebomber, threatening her because we “couldn’t handle that our time was nigh”. This quasi biblical turn of phrase presumably meant that our lifetime of tobacco control efforts were about to fall in a heap because of the unstoppable tide of illicit cigarettes and vapes that would soon bring the decades-long decline in smoking to a humiliating end.

The small detail missing from this tragic scenario, was that the recently released 2025 data on national smoking prevalence showed the largest decline ever recorded since the surveys began in 1991 (see graph below).

The claims being made now were:

1. Again, that I use a “troll account”, this time namely cptsnooze @plimpee,  to try to intimidate her
2. Those who use anonymous accounts seek to hide their identity to enable them to make threatening and disparaging comments with impunity. This is unprincipled, devious and cowardly behaviour.
3. I want her to “pull your head in” about vaping
4. I have threatened to firebomb her if she does not “pull her head in”
5. I am thus planning criminal arson and perhaps injury and murder
6. I therefore should be widely understood to be a disgraceful, contemptible person deserving criminal investigation.

This fevered, sick stuff had attracted 258 views and 9 likes by the time I sent her a concerns notice with a list of demands involving immediate deletion and pinning a full apology to the top of all her social media.

She wrote apologising and took down the post. But added this little beauty “For the avoidance of doubt, I did not intend to accuse you of threatening to firebomb me, planning arson, intending to injure or murder me, or engaging in any other criminal conduct. Those allegations were not words that I published, and they were not the meaning I intended to convey.”  (my emphasis)

I accepted the apology but told her the snivelling weasel words above were puerile and disingenuous. Assuming she was not awash with assets, I said I had no appetite to harm her financially, but would not hesitate to take legal action if she had another crack.

In preparing for a possible lack of apology and takedown, I looked at the followers data on her social media pages to get some perspective to the reach of her defamation.  As can be seen, they are sad little numbers with her messages landing with an almost homeopathically small proportion of Australia’s vapers, let alone of the Australian public.

X: 2,806

Buy Pippa a Coffee: 28

Bluesky Pippas: 114

Bluesky ALIVE: 316

Facebook Pippa Starr:114

Facebook ALIVE: 318

Instagram: 184

Threads: 33

On the ALIVE’s Youtube page, there are 102 posts from Jun 2024 to Jul 2026. On Sept 8, 2026 these had a median viewing rate of just 25. 

Contrast this to the 175 median views across all 49 Youtubes of my on-everyone’s-lips, stadium-filling rock band knocking out covers in Sydney pubs.

Trolling and abuse sadly goes with the territory in much of public health advocacy.  Here’s a selection of some of the very worst I kept from a few years ago. The vaping space  is one of the very worst I’ve encountered in a 50 year career of contribution to a wide range of public health issues.