Australia's prohibition double whammy

The government of South Australia has launched an anti-vaping campaign on social media aimed at impressionable youngsters. It features some woman from the Cancer Council asserting that vaping "definitely" causes lung cancer based on a speculative report that doesn't even make that claim.

 

EXCLUSIVE: A new anti-vaping campaign is being rolled out across social media apps, targeting impressionable young South Australians. Authorities say while teen vaping rates are declining, there are still far too many becoming addicted to nicotine. @HanniHowe pic.twitter.com/pq99iNjbp9

— 7NEWS Adelaide (@7NewsAdelaide) December 15, 2025

 

Aside from the misinformation, there is an obvious problem with this campaign. Australia banned all social media for the under-16s last week (including YouTube!). The most likely outcome of this is that the cool kids will find a workaround (VPNs, for example) and leave the minority excluded. Perhaps the government thinks the same so is targeting kids on the platforms that it has just banned.

 

The sale of vapes is not just banned to the under-16s but to everybody in Australia. So we have a public information campaign telling kids who cannot legally see the adverts not to buy a product that nobody can legally buy. It's almost as if the government doesn't have much faith in prohibition, isn't it?

 

Incidentally, the news report notes that the youth vaping rate in Australia has fallen from 15% to 11% recently. In the UK, where vapes are legal (though only to adults) and there is less of a moral panic about vaping, the rate is 7%.

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From harm reduction to harm elimination

After the WHO anti-nicotine conference last month, I wrote...

 

It is very clear that the Bloomberg/WHO approach from now on will be to demonise nicotine and portray harm reduction as an industry scam.

 

This will require some sharp U-turns given that nicotine products are on the WHO's list of essential medicines and "harm reduction" is an explicit part of the WHO's definition of tobacco control, but we're dealing with seasoned liars who face no pushback from the media so they have every chance of success.

 

Nicotine was literally advertised as being "therapeutic" when Big Pharma was the main seller of it outside of cigarettes. It is now portrayed as some sort of brain poison. And the WHO's war on harm reduction goes beyond the demonstrably false narrative of it being an "industry" invention. They are now changing the very meaning of the term, as some of Bloomberg's minions explained in an article in Tobacco Control this week...

 

This year’s discussion demonstrated the strong interest among Parties in identifying the best approaches to protect future generations from both tobacco and nicotine addiction. In preparation for this discussion, the Convention Secretariat prepared a report, making it clear that there is no legitimate ‘tobacco harm reduction’ based on advancing the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry. In the context of the WHO FCTC, ‘harm reduction’ is ‘harm elimination,’ the intended outcome from the full implementation of the treaty’s existing, evidence-based measures. 

 

This is a grotesque rewriting of history and the dictionary. Harm reduction has never meant, or even implied, harm elimination, and if the authors of the FCTC had meant 'harm elimination' they would have said so. This is truly Orwellian.

 

As Michael Siegel says:

 

The rejection of harm reduction by WHO endangers the lives of millions of smokers worldwide. The WHO is literally abandoning smokers and using them as sacrificial lambs in an effort to demonize safer alternatives to cigarettes because the FCTC leaders can't stand the idea that the use of a nicotine product could actually be beneficial to health (even though they have no problem with pharmaceutical companies reaping in billions of dollars based on the same concept - perhaps this is because the WHO Foundation receives millions from the pharmaceutical industry). 

While it is bad enough that tobacco control organizations and health agencies in the United States have shunned harm reduction in tobacco control, the fact that WHO has rejected harm reduction strategies to address the worldwide burden of smoking-related disease is truly a global public health disaster. 

 

It would be interesting to know to what extent this is being driven by the pharmaceutical industry, as Siegel implies. My sense is that it is the Tobacco Taliban within the various Bloomberg front groups who are really pulling the strings. After all, if the goal is total harm elimination, Big Pharma's products are in the cross-hairs too. 0.4% of the risk of cigarettes is 0.4% too much!

 

 

 

Can someone tell me what the hell is the ethical basis for a harm elimination strategy backed up by state coercion?

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Old Mudgie RIP

I was very saddened to hear the news that the Pub Curmudgeon has died. He started blogging in July 2007, largely in response to the smoking ban. Mudgie was not a smoker but he was very fond of pubs and he could see the damage the ban would do to the pub trade (he also ran the Closed Pubs blog). Over the years, he discussed other aspects of the nanny state and was always a thoughtful, free thinking and witty commentator on all matters related to beer, public houses and liberty. 

Until yesterday, all I knew about him personally was that he was a nonsmoker who lived in the north-west. I now know him as Peter Edwardson and can put a face to the name thanks to this charming photo of him doing what he loved most - having a pint of bitter and tweeting. 

Another pic of a smiling Mudgie, here with Paul Bailey and copious Bass in the Jolly Sailor in Macclesfield. https://t.co/GABWDeBYPQ pic.twitter.com/XlOhEq6IOL

— retiredmartin (@NHS_Martin) December 7, 2025

 

Raise a glass to him. He'll be sorely missed. 

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The fantasy land of 'public health' academia

This is pretty shocking. Seven 'public health' researchers looked at a survey which showed that self-reported alcohol consumption rose sharply in March/April 2020 and remained significantly higher than average for several years. Although they knew that the survey method had changed from face-to-face to via telephone in March 2020, and that people under-report alcohol consumption more in face-to-face interviews, they assumed the rise to be real. At no point did they consult either the alcohol sales figures or the alcohol duty receipts which show that no such rise took place - on the contrary, per capita consumption fell. Instead, they conclude that the rise in alcohol-specific deaths during the pandemic shows that consumption probably rose.

This is your tax money at work (thank you SPECTRUM). One of the authors is Sarah Jackson who is normally relatively sensible. Two of the others are part of the Sheffield University alcohol modelling team and have therefore been living in a world of fantasy for years. Even so, this strikes me as a bit of a milestone in post-truth 'public health' academia. The field of alcohol research seems to be more detached from reality than ever. They model policies which don't work and then conduct modelling studies to show that they worked. Now they're arguing with basic facts. They have got away with conning people for so long that they think they can say anything in a peer-reviewed study and make it become the truth. 

Where were the peer reviewers anyway? 

I've written about it for The Critic. 

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The OBR is bad and HMRC is worse

I've got a piece up at The Critic about the hopeless OBR and my struggle to get HMRC to face up to the size of the tobacco black market. 

 

As I have said several times before, it is a mathematical impossibility for illicit tobacco to make up only 13.8% of the total market (as HMT claims). The number of cigarettes sold legally in the UK fell from 23.4 billion to 14 billion between 2021 and 2024 - a drop of 40% - and the amount of hand-rolling tobacco sold legally fell from 8.6 million kilograms to 4.5 million kilograms - a drop of 48%. At the same time, according to the ONS, the total number of smokers fell by 20%, from 6.6 million to 5.3 million. In other words, legal tobacco sales have been falling at more than twice the rate as the number of cigarettes that are being smoked. It is blindingly obvious that the black market has picked up the slack.

... Even if you assume that there was no illicit tobacco sales in 2021, the data since then shows that they must now make up 28% of the market, twice as much as HMRC claims. And since there clearly was a black market for tobacco in 2021, the true figure must be even higher.

 

I didn't mention it in the article because it's too dull, but if you're wondering where I got the 28% figure from, it is derived from the following...

 

2021: 31,988 billion cigarettes sold legally (including hand-rolled cigarettes, based on 1,000 cigarettes per kilogram).

 

If this had declined by 20%, in line with the drop in smoking prevalence, there would be 25,590 billion cigarettes sold legally in 2024.

 

In fact, there were only 18,465 billion cigarettes sold legally in 2024. 

 

This makes a shortfall of 7,125 billion cigarettes sold legally, which is 28% of 25,590 billion.

 

As the excellent Geoff Vann has pointed out on Twitter, more big taxes rises have already been pencilled in for next year, although the government has decided not to introduce a massive 10% plus inflation tax hike on rolling tobacco, as recommended by the political arsonists at ASH.

 

 

ASH's prohibitionists reckon the policy of even heavier taxation of rolling tobacco has "worked" because the proportion of smokers buying it as dropped. A much more plausible explanation is that fewer people feel the need to resort to rolling tobacco now that they can buy real cigarettes for a fiver on the black market.

 

As Geoff also points out, the ONS is a bit of an outlier when it comes to estimating smoking prevalence. The Smoking Toolkit study and ASH's own study show little or no decline in the smoking rate since 2021. I'll continue to rely on the ONS figures because they are official statistics, but if the other surveys are right, the black market must be bigger still.
 

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The WHO's "best buys" for alcohol

I've written a briefing for Epicenter off the back of this year's Nanny State Index about the WHO's so-called "best buys" for alcohol. These are the policies that are supposedly most cost-effective in cutting alcohol-related harm. As I show, there is scant evidence that they are effective at all, and they are certainly neither a sufficient nor necessary way of dealing with the problem.

Download it here or read a slightly modified version on my Substack. 

 

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What happened at COP11?

The WHO's big anti-nicotine bash is over and the delegates have long since taken their first class flights home. So what happened? As usual, not a lot. Very little was agreed, mostly because the FCTC secretariat has become so extreme that it cannot get a consensus. It was hoping for an agreement to get a ban on cigarette filters. That got plenty of sensible opposition to that mad idea, as they did with advertising bans for e-cigarettes. Delegates agree to "consider" the WHO's loony "forward-looking measures" but that doesn't mean anything. The nutters who run this conference, including former UK civil servant Andrew Black, put a brave face on it, but very little was achieved.

 

The FCTC secretariat managed to squeeze in some mentions of "tobacco and nicotine products" into its closing benediction, but the WHO is doing that anyway. The real battle lies outside these shindigs. It is very clear that the Bloomberg/WHO approach from now on will be to demonise nicotine and portray harm reduction as an industry scam.

 

This will require some sharp U-turns given that nicotine products are on the WHO's list of essential medicines and "harm reduction" is an explicit part of the WHO's definition of tobacco control, but we're dealing with seasoned liars who face no pushback from the media so they have every chance of success. Look at this mental stuff from Quebec!

 

 

Speaking of a compliant media, here's how Health Policy News explains the flop that was COP.

 

‘Unprecedented Levels of Industry Interference’ Stalls Decisions on New Tobacco Products and Pollution at UNFCTC COP11 

 

'Industry interference', the deus ex machina of "public health".  

 

It's just so tedious. This conference, like the even more expensive climate ones, are simply a waste of time. As David Zaruk says, "as long as the organizers are beholden to the zealots and billionaire prohibitionists, no one will notice and fewer delegates will bother attending or contributing." Read his account and check out the musings of Maria Papaioannoy (pictured with me at Good COP below) here.

 

And read my article from this weekend's IEA newsletter. 

 

 

 

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