Australia’s Vape Crackdown: A Cautionary Tale in Public Health Overreach

Alan Gor 19 May 2025

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17579139251317350 Australia is often hailed as a leader in tobacco control. But its increasingly draconian stance on e-cigarettes risks turning a success story into a cautionary tale. In their recent article, “A Short History of E-Cigarette Policy in Australia,” researchers C. Jenkins, J. Morgan, and C. Kelso offer a detailed timeline of how vaping legislation has evolved from patchy state-based controls to some of the world’s most restrictive national reforms.

But while the authors clearly document the tightening of regulation, their work also highlights something else: how well-intentioned policies, if untethered from behavioural realities and harm reduction principles, can produce unintended consequences that undermine their very goals.

The illusion of control

Australia’s policy shift began in earnest in 2021 with the introduction of TGO110, a product standard for nicotine vaping products. This move was accompanied by the rescheduling of nicotine to a prescription-only medicine. In theory, this would help prevent youth access and limit unregulated imports.

But in practice, it has created a parallel market of illegal, often unlabelled and untested products that are now widely available across the country. Rather than cracking down on demand, Australia simply outsourced supply to the black market, a reality Jenkins and colleagues acknowledge but perhaps understate.

Since then, the government has continued to escalate restrictions. In 2024, it banned disposable vape imports, shut down the Personal Importation Scheme, and removed nearly all flavours from sale except in pharmacies. Most recently, nicotine concentrations above 20 mg/ml require a prescription, and all vaping products, nicotine or not, are now limited to mint, menthol or tobacco flavours.

These are extraordinary measures. But youth vaping rates remain high, as Jenkins et al. note. Which raises the obvious question: if the policy is “working,” why aren’t the results showing it?

The rise of unregulated access

The black market has flourished precisely because legal access became so difficult. The prescription model was always a poor fit for what is fundamentally a consumer behaviour, not a medical condition. Very few young people or adult smokers, for that matter, are willing to consult a GP just to switch from smoking to vaping. As a result, illicit retailers have stepped in, and enforcement has struggled to keep pace.

Age checks are rare, packaging is misleading, and products are often imported without quality control. We have not “protected” youth, we’ve simply created a riskier environment for everyone.

Medicalising a behavioural issue

Australia’s approach to vaping is unique in how aggressively it pushes the issue into a pharmaceutical framework. While countries like the UK encourage vaping as a lower-risk alternative to smoking, Australia treats it as a tightly controlled therapeutic good—something that must be prescribed, dispensed, and stripped of appeal.

But this approach confuses regulation with deterrence. Vaping is not harmless, but it is significantly less harmful than combustible tobacco. By making access harder than cigarettes (still sold in every corner shop), Australia risks pushing smokers away from harm reduction tools and back toward the product that causes the most harm.

Punishing adults to protect children?

The crackdown is framed as a child protection issue, and there’s no doubt that youth vaping is a concern. But current policies function more as a political response to public anxiety than a proportionate, evidence-based intervention. Banning flavours, closing down retail channels, and criminalising sales have done little to curb youth uptake.

Meanwhile, adult smokers—particularly those from lower socio-economic backgrounds—are left without realistic alternatives. Public health messaging has become confused, and the people most likely to benefit from vaping as a cessation aid are increasingly marginalised by a system designed to punish access, not reduce harm.

What Australia could learn from the UK

In the UK, e-cigarettes are integrated into stop-smoking services. Flavours remain available, quality is ensured by regulation, and retailers are held accountable for age verification. This is not deregulation, it’s targeted, pragmatic harm reduction.

Australia could move toward a similar model that balances regulation with accessibility, distinguishes between youth protection and adult cessation, and treats vaping not as a moral failure or medical emergency, but as part of a broader tobacco control strategy.

Rethink, don’t double down

Jenkins, Morgan and Kelso have provided a valuable record of how we got here. But history is not the same as progress. As the next wave of restrictions takes effect in mid-2025, policymakers must ask: are we improving health outcomes, or simply tightening control for its own sake?

Without a course correction, Australia risks becoming a case study in how overregulation can undermine public health, alienate consumers, and hand the market to criminal networks. We need a smarter, more balanced policy before the damage becomes irreversible.