The great Australian nicotine airlift

The stupid Australian government is banning the importation of e-cigarette fluid on July 1st. This has led to a massive, Dunkirk-style effort by vapers to stock up for the rest of their lives.

One retailer in New Zealand had to stop taking orders earlier this week because it couldn't cope. I dare say they were others.

We're extremely sorry we had to take the site offline earlier than planned, and we're keenly aware how devastating this decision will be for those who thought they had more time and didn't make the cut-off.

Frankly, we underestimated just how crazy things would get: over 10,000 people placed huge orders in the last 24 hours, and our number one priority has to be making sure that every single parcel gets shipped before the government's ludicrous deadline.

My eyes were opened to the lengths to which Aussie vapers were going when I received an e-mail from a reader yesterday. With his permission, I am quoting part of it below. For reasons that will become obvious, he wishes to remain anonymous.

Never in the history of Australian airport customs will they have seen what they are seeing this week. Literally tens of thousands of litres of nicotine is coming in on cargo planes. It is 'The Great Australian Nicotine Airlift'.

Just think of it, I am in the market for a new garage freezer to store all my nicotine in, I've had to rapidly learn how to inject argon gas into the glass bottles I bought to rebottle the nicotine and make it last decades, which chemists and amateur storers say can be done if you do it right, and very carefully preserve it in the deep freeze.

However, chest freezers are sold out in Australia right now due to the panic buying of meat from Covid.

So twice in one year, a need for chest freezers based on panic buying created and instigated by the government.

I've never spiked my own juice in my life. I hope it tastes neutral when I do it. I bought several years of readymade nicotine-containing Black Note tobacco extracted liquid which in my opinion is the closest vape to a cigarette in the world, but that will run out in 2022 and I'll have to start using the nicotine supply from the freezer to spike the zero-nic Black Note which allegedly will still be permitted to be imported.

As to be expected, there is a lot of naive people online drafting emails to the health minister. They'll get nowhere.

The Australian vaping scene spread by word of mouth, because vape shops are not allowed to sell nicotine, and each new recruit to vaping had to be laboriously trained by a friend or family member in the ways of vaping. I had to train my boomer relatives the in the ins and outs of the learning curve, the techniques one must master, tanks, mods, nic levels, wattage levels, changing the mass produced coils, etc. Nobody ever saw a vape ad on the side of a bus in Australia, nobody ever saw vape shops on the high street except in very rare cases, dozens nationwide at best.

So somehow the vaping population grew, mostly from online reading and forums and knowing someone who vaped, and mail order international import sales, to an estimated 300,000 vapers, out of a nation of 2.7 million smokers, out of the 24 million Australians.

The pride the public health establishment take in being 'world leaders' on ripping away big tobacco's intellectual property rights and forcing poo brown plain packaging, and the massive cig prices, is huge. They were never going to let their reputation as 'leaders' in tobacco/nicotine habit control be taken away by a mid-2010s new interloper, vaping.

In 20 years, a tiny population of die hards, me included among their number, will be traipsing out to the garage freezer to get a few millilitres of nicotine purchased in a panic buy 20 years prior.

No matter how many times the media and elites are reminded 'The UK and NZ don't do this', they just see the UK and NZ as insanely liberal on vaping and they refuse to budge an inch.

It is rather degrading actually, to be stuck here. A despair has come over me. I was energised the first two days, busy purchasing nicotine and eliquid and researching agron gas storage and freezer sizes, but now I am just reminded of the general loss of liberty society-wide in many areas.

Imagine having to talk to chemists in forums about how long drugs, and nicotine, can have its life extended as long as possible, because government constantly bans things and you're reduced to cherishing an irreplaceable stockpile and figuring out how to conserve it.

The panic buying of nicotine I've seen this week is dangerous, in that people who are total neophytes at handling the industrial grade - sometimes gallon! - bottles of freebase nicotine, will be buying this stuff to chuck in their freezer with no training, just because they heard on the panic grapevine via Facebook that this is what to buy.

Australian customs may well even act BEFORE the July 1st deadline, because what's coming in on cargo planes is just unprecedented. Tens of thousands of litres of pure concentrated nicotine freebase.

I couldn't believe when a lady who had no idea about vaping, only started vaping a month ago, said she'd just bought a gallon bottle of freebase nicotine from America.

I'm glad for her, but tens of thousands of brand new freebase nicotine customers, CAUSED BY the government clowns, there's gonna be a few nicotine overdoses believe me. 100mg/ml nicotine can burn through your fingers if you don't use gloves and make you very sick.

It is bedlam right now. The limp 'advocacy' attempts will come after July 1st. Right now it's just about filling up those freezers. I am told my new freezer is on the way, meanwhile I have to deal with five courier packages this week for myself, and have to worry about my relatives not going back to cigarettes by guiding them on how to buy freebase nicotine in a rapidly dwindling market where numerous shops online are just saying 'no more Aussies'. A big supplier in Hong Kong called 'HiLiq' simply said no more Australians we can't handle the demand.

It's just so ugly... loss of liberty. It really is.