Australia ran the most successful anti-smoking campaign the world had ever seen. Not one of the most successful, the most successful. We reduced daily tobacco consumption from around 52 per cent of all Australians aged 16 and over in the late 1940s down to around 13 per cent just a few years ago. That is not a small achievement. That is decades of disciplined, consistent, evidence-based public health work paying off in one of the most sustained behaviour change campaigns any country has ever managed.
And then we watched it get systematically undermined.
A Campaign That Was Actually Working
The Quit campaign succeeded because it kept the message simple and it never wavered. Don’t start. If you started, quit completely. No substitutes – No safer alternatives – No managed use – Just stop. That sustained clarity in and from all major sectors, health, policy, government, media and education, cut through for decades and the numbers proved it.
The data from that period showed around 100,000 Australians quitting annually. Real people walking away from a real addiction and that is the campaign working exactly as intended. The problem was that roughly the same number from the emerging youth demographic were replacing those who quit each year. That should have been the alarm bell. Instead, addiction for profit activists saw it as an opening and they moved quickly to exploit it.
Cannabis: The First Substitution
That youth replacement trend did not emerge in isolation, it coincided directly with the steady liberalisation of cannabis use across Australia. Along with the faux medicinal prefix conveniently attached to it, cannabis was reframed in the public mind as the more acceptable, less harmful option to tobacco. Genuine clinical need had very little to do with how that label landed in popular culture. It was a perception shift, and it was effective.
Suddenly the choice for young Australians was not between using and not using. It was between products, with one framed as medicine and the other as poison, that is a profound and deliberate shift. Harm reduction did not discourage substance use here, it redirected it toward a different product while keeping the behaviour intact and unsurprisingly, redirected use still builds dependency.
Dependency drives demand – that pattern is not complicated and it is not accidental.
Vaping: Same Trick, New Vehicle
If cannabis cracked the prevention model, vaping came along and really went to work on it. Pro-drug activists hijacked harm reduction again, this time pushing e-cigarettes hard as the clean, modern alternative to tobacco. A legitimate quitting tool, they said. A safer delivery mechanism that declared – compassionate harm reduction in action was the ad nauseum spin.
Except it did not stop people inhaling health-destroying toxins, it just changed the device.
The fundamental behaviour, drawing toxic substances into your lungs, remained completely intact. And then, surprise surprise, we discovered that this new delivery vehicle carried its own serious harms; Respiratory damage, cardiovascular risk, lung injuries that were not supposed to exist in a product sold as the safe alternative. Who could possibly have seen that coming!
What vaping actually delivered, away from the carefully controlled conditions of clinical trials, was a brand new generation of nicotine users who had never smoked a cigarette in their lives – teenagers and young adults. Drawn in by flavours, by slick marketing, by a product deliberately designed to feel nothing like smoking while delivering exactly the same addiction. These were not smokers switching to a safer product, these were new users being recruited into nicotine dependency through a door that harm reduction activists propped wide open. Dependency followed – demand followed dependency, and that demand needed somewhere to go.
A Generation Sold a Crock
So here we are, a generation sold a lie on multiple fronts. Cannabis was medicine. Vaping was quitting. Every step dressed up as harm reduction, every step quietly encouraging use rather than ending it, every step adding to the pool of dependent users while presenting itself as a public health solution, and now it has all landed back on the cigarette.
That is the real backdrop to Australia’s exploding illicit tobacco trade. Illicit product now accounts for somewhere between a third and half of all tobacco sold nationally. Excise losses run between seven and twelve billion dollars annually. A decade ago that number sat under one billion. The trajectory is not subtle. Organised crime moved into that space fast and they brought arson, shootings and systematic retailer intimidation with them. This is not a grey market, this is a serious criminal enterprise operating at scale, and it is operating into a demand base that bad harm reduction policy helped build and maintain.
The Quit Campaign Did Not Fail
Now the message gaining traction in the public square is that the War on Tobacco failed, that the illicit market proves it. That prevention doesn’t work and we need a new approach. Same old mantra, new spin, same people pushing it.
Let us be crystal clear, the Quit campaign did not fail – it worked and it can still work. What failed was harm reduction policy hijacked by addiction-for-profit operators who are very good at exactly one thing – finding ways to build an inescapable customer base. The playbook is consistent; introduce a substitute, market it as safer, recruit new users under the cover of helping existing ones. Normalise the behaviour, sustain the dependency and collect the revenue.
They line their pockets and they throw hapless thousands into an already collapsing health system to manage the ever-increasing damage their products cause. And then they point at the chaos they helped create and call it proof that prevention doesn’t work. It is breathtaking in its cynicism and it has been running for a long time.
The short- and long-term harms of this game are almost inestimable. And the first step toward addressing them honestly is calling it exactly what it is.
Dalgarno Institute (Source: WRD News)