How Do the “Academic Advisors” Get Away With Their Ideology?

Alan Gor 05 August 2025

In Australia’s ongoing war on vaping and tobacco, a small but powerful group of public health academics has quietly become the architects of one of the most punitive nicotine control regimes in the developed world. They’re the “academic advisors” media darlings, policy whisperers, and regular fixtures on government committees.

But as smoking rises among young adults, illicit markets explode, and vapers are pushed back to cigarettes, an urgent question looms: How are these advisors still getting away with it?

From Science to Dogma: The Evolution of Tobacco Control

Once upon a time, these academics were rightly celebrated. Australia was a global leader in tobacco control, plain packaging, graphic warnings, and tax hikes. These measures helped slash smoking rates over decades. That was then.

But times have changed. New technologies have emerged, most notably nicotine vaping, offering smokers a far safer alternative. Other countries, from the UK to New Zealand to Sweden, have embraced these tools with measurable success. But not Australia.

Here, the old guard dug in. They declared war on vaping, not because the science demanded it, but because their worldview couldn’t accommodate it. In their eyes, any nicotine use, regardless of harm profile, is a threat. Harm reduction? A Trojan horse for Big Tobacco. Consumer autonomy? A loophole for addiction profiteers.

That’s no longer evidence-based policy, it’s ideological conviction.

The Illusion of Neutrality

So how do they maintain such influence?

By cloaking ideology in the language of expertise.

Take Simon Chapman or Becky Freeman. Both are endlessly cited as impartial experts despite having staked clear moral positions against vaping. Freeman helped lead the “Generation Vape” campaign. Chapman routinely smears harm reduction advocates and ridicules data that contradicts his worldview.

Yet they’re still treated by media and government as neutral authorities quoted without challenge, elevated above dissenters, and rarely held to account for failed outcomes.

It’s a bait-and-switch: beliefs masquerading as evidence-based policy.

Four Ways They Stay Untouchable

1. Institutional Capture

These advisors sit on advisory committees, shape research agendas, and influence journal publication norms. They help write the rules, then act as the referees. It’s a self-reinforcing circle with no meaningful checks or counterbalance.

2. Moral Panic as Strategy

By framing vaping as a “youth epidemic,” they short-circuit public debate. Who wants to be seen defending something “targeting kids”? Never mind that most vapers are adults trying to quit smoking. The framing is everything, and they control it.

3. Media Compliance

Journalists too often parrot talking points without scrutiny. Balanced reporting is rare. Contrasting views, especially from pro-harm reduction voices, are excluded, smeared, or misrepresented. It’s a public relations machine disguised as journalism.

4. Reputation as Immunity

Their past contributions to tobacco control, while real, now function as armour. Question them and you’re accused of attacking public health itself. This makes it politically and socially risky for younger academics, clinicians, or policymakers to dissent even as the evidence mounts against their current strategies.

When Ideology Meets Reality

Here’s the real-world fallout of their influence:

• Vaping access has been criminalised unless obtained via pharmacy/prescription, a model virtually no other country uses, and which most pharmacists refuse to support.

• Illicit vape and cigarette sales are booming. Black-market retailers operate openly in major cities, supplying cheap, unregulated products to both adults and youth.

• Smoking is rising among young adults. Roy Morgan’s 2025 data shows a post-ban increase in smoking among 18–24-year-olds, precisely the group most likely to have used vaping as a quitting tool.

• The legal market is shrinking, but the illegal one is thriving, exactly the opposite of what effective public health policy should achieve.

And yet… the advisors double down. More enforcement. More bans. Higher penalties. Less access to reduced-risk alternatives.

It’s prohibition all over again, just with modern branding.

Where Is the Accountability?

You’d think that, in the face of these outcomes, policymakers would question the advice they’ve been following. But no, the advisors remain untouchable. The policies fail, and somehow the solution is always “more of the same.”

This is what happens when ideological purity trumps practical outcomes.

No other area of health policy would tolerate this. Imagine cancer experts refusing to recommend a proven treatment because it didn’t align with their moral worldview. Or diabetes advisors ignoring a drug that works because it wasn’t their idea. It would be unthinkable. Yet in the nicotine policy, it’s normal.

A Better Way Forward

Australia doesn’t need to choose between protecting kids and helping adults quit smoking. Other countries have shown it’s possible to regulate vaping responsibly, restrict youth access, and make reduced-risk options available to smokers who need them.

But to get there, we need to stop outsourcing public health strategy to people who view this issue through a 1990s lens.

The public health establishment should be guided by outcomes, not dogma. The role of advisors should be to improve lives, not preserve reputations. And the media should stop treating every moral panic as settled science.

Because when we ignore reality to protect ideology, the people who suffer most are those with the least voice, smokers who want to quit, vapers criminalised for making a healthier choice, and youth pushed into black markets that nobody can control.

Enough is enough.

It’s time to hold the academic gatekeepers to the same standard as everyone else: not by their titles, but by the real-world consequences of their advice.