Mark Butler’s Advisors Built This Black Market, Not Criminal Gangs

Alan Gor 28 May 2025

Anti-vaping activists advising the Australian Health Minister are praising South Australia’s vaping enforcement effort, which spins a convenient story: criminal gangs and shady retailers are the villains, and the government is finally cracking down. But it’s all smoke and mirrors.

The truth is, Australia’s black market vaping crisis was engineered knowingly by Mark Butler’s closest advisors. And now they’re scrambling to rewrite history to cover up their catastrophic miscalculation. 

They spruik that “enforcement” is the answer to solving the crisis that now sees deadly cigarettes cheaper and more available than they have been this century!

However, enforcing this mess is not only impossible, it’s like saying Australia could win a war against a major force without allies! It’s insane! 

Mark Butler continually says he “won’t raise the white flag”, yet he is about as likely to win the war on illicit tobacco and vapes as a firefighter trying to extinguish an inferno with a squirt gun!

This Was Never About Gangs. It Was About Control.

Let’s be clear: criminal gangs didn’t create the vape market; they stepped into the void created by a government determined to ban its way out of a public health issue. That decision didn’t come from evidence-based policy. It came from ideologues in the Minister for Health’s inner circle.

Butler's advisors, people with long histories in anti-vaping activism, pushed for a pharmacy-only model despite global evidence that it wouldn't work. These are not neutral experts. They are prohibitionists cloaked in public health titles, determined to crush vaping even if it means propping up Big Tobacco and fuelling organised crime.

They knew removing the legal retail supply would unleash a black market. Despite being repeatedly warned by retailers, harm reduction experts, police, and even state health departments, they went ahead anyway.

South Australia: The “Success Story” with No Proof

The article praises South Australia for its enforcement blitz. But where’s the data? Have youth vaping rates fallen? Has the black market shrunk? Are adult smokers finding it easier to access safer alternatives?

Of course not, because the policy wasn’t designed to reduce harm. It was designed to deliver a political win. And now, when it’s clearly failing, the same advisors are coaching Butler to double down.

What is really happening in South Australia? https://www.aliveadvocacymovement.com/post/a-flawed-victory-lap-sahmri-s-south-australian-health-and-medical-research-institute-vaping-study

Retailers Weren’t the Problem. They Were the Solution.

Specialist vape retailers once played a vital role in helping adults quit smoking. They provided guidance, product quality, and age-gated environments. But they didn’t fit the vision of Butler’s team of anti-vaping advisors.

So instead of being part of a regulated future, they were cut out entirely, with no transition plan and no pathway to legitimacy. Then they were vilified in the media, as if they were the source of the problem.

They weren’t. Mark Butler’s advisors were.

When the Advisors Run the Show, Evidence Gets Tossed

Let’s not pretend the Health Minister is acting on neutral, science-based recommendations. His vaping policies reflect the worldview of a tight circle of extremist activists-turned-advisors. Their fingerprints are all over this policy failure:

• The demonisation of nicotine.

• The erasure of adult vapers.

• The silence on real smoking rates.

• The obsession with enforcement over regulation.

These aren’t public health strategies. They’re moral crusades driven by ideology that vacuum hundreds of millions of dollars out of the public purse.

And now that their policies have helped create a thriving criminal market, they’re pushing Butler to blame everyone else: retailers, state police, “noncompliant” consumers and anyone but the people who actually wrote the script to the biggest public health policy failure ever seen in Australian history!

Adults Don’t Matter to Them

One of the most telling omissions in the SA “success story” is any mention of adults. The word “smoker” doesn’t appear once. Nor does “ex-smoker.” Because to Butler’s advisory circle, adult vapers are a political inconvenience, and people who’ve rejected pharmaceutical cessation products don’t fit the abstinence-only dogma.

But here’s the truth: hundreds of thousands of Australians are using nicotine vaping products to avoid smoking, and they’ve been abandoned.

We’re Watching a Health Minister Protect His Advisors’ Reputations

This is what it’s really about now: damage control. The advisors know their strategy has failed beyond repair. The Health Minister knows public trust is collapsing. So the story is being rewritten: it wasn’t bad policy, it was “gangs.” It wasn’t prohibition, it was “poor enforcement.” It wasn’t an advisor-led crusade; it was “the will of the government.”

But we, the consumers, see through the smoke and mirrors.

This black market was born in Canberra. Raised by advisors who ignored the evidence. And protected by a Minister unwilling to admit his team of radicals got it wrong.

The crisis will grow until we replace ideology with science and secrecy with transparency. And the next article praising enforcement won’t mention the real culprits, the people whispering in the Minister’s ear, even as the house burns down!