Queensland Health’s Vaping Report: Policy-Based Evidence, Not Evidence-Based Policy
- 09algor
- Apr 16
- 4 min read
Alan Gor 16 April 2025
If you ever needed a case study of how public health messaging can be twisted by politics, Queensland Health’s latest vaping report is it.
Released with an air of authority, this 2025 update paints vaping as a looming public health crisis, packed with scary stats, cherry-picked studies, and moral panic. But read between the lines and it’s clear: this isn’t a serious attempt to weigh the evidence. It’s a carefully constructed narrative to justify a policy position that was locked in long before the data came in.
So, let’s break it down.
1. The Art of Framing: Hype Over Honesty
The report opens with a familiar scare line: “Evidence of harms continues to mount.” But what it doesn’t say is just as important.
Nowhere will you find mention of the vast body of global research showing that vaping is dramatically less harmful than smoking. Nothing about the findings from the UK’s Royal College of Physicians or Cochrane reviews showing vaping is more effective than nicotine patches or gums. Nothing about how vaping is keeping ex-smokers smoke-free.
Instead, the report leans heavily on work by Banks et al.—whose reviews have been widely criticised for cherry-picking negative data and ignoring the context of harm reduction. The same playbook is being used again here: selective evidence, cited as gospel.
2. The Gateway Myth, Again
Apparently, vaping leads kids to smoking because non-smokers who vape are “three times more likely to go on to smoke.” Sounds terrifying… until you look at the studies.
These numbers come from observational research that can’t prove cause and effect. The kids who try vaping are often the ones most likely to try anything risky — the “common liability” model. But the report doesn’t engage with that idea. It just parrots outdated scare lines, long since debunked in countries like the UK and New Zealand, where youth vaping rose — and smoking plummeted.
Cherry-picked data with no context is not science. It’s propaganda.
3. What About Adult Smokers? Oh Right… We Don’t Talk About Them
There’s almost no mention of adults using vaping to quit smoking. No mention of dual use as a transitional phase. No interviews, stories, or even numbers showing that hundreds of thousands of Australians have quit with the help of vapes.
Worse, the report suggests vaping might cause relapse in ex-smokers — a claim with almost zero evidence behind it. If anything, we hear the opposite from thousands of ex-smokers who say vaping is the only thing that’s kept them off cigarettes.
You’d think a public health department would be interested in that. Apparently not.
4. Where’s the Harm Reduction?
The term “harm reduction” isn’t even in the report. That should tell you everything.
If you were serious about reducing tobacco-related deaths — still over 20,000 a year in Australia — you’d want to compare risks. But the report refuses to discuss relative risk. Instead, it lumps vaping in with smoking, even hinting that some people think vaping is “healthy” (spoiler: no one credible says that — they say it’s less harmful, and they’re right).
The goal seems to be to keep the public confused — to treat harm reduction as a threat rather than a solution.
5. Fear Campaigns and Youth Narratives
The section on youth is the real political engine of the document. It’s designed to alarm.
They quote rising “past month use” among high schoolers but fail to explain how many of those kids are just experimenting — not regular users. Worse, they present “ever tried” numbers as if they’re meaningful, when most of us have tried things once and moved on.
Yes, youth vaping needs attention. But honesty helps more than hysteria. You don’t need to scare parents and voters with misleading stats — unless your goal is to sell bad policy.
6. Environmental Hazards — The Kitchen Sink Approach
If you can’t win the health argument, try the environmental one. That’s the strategy here.
Suddenly, battery disposal and litter are central concerns. But ask yourself: do we ban phones because they catch fire occasionally? No — we regulate them. Proper disposal and recycling of vaping products is a solvable issue, not a reason to deny adults access to lifesaving alternatives.
7. Pretending the Policy Came After the Evidence
Let’s be honest. This report wasn’t written to inform policy. It was written to justify it.
Queensland and federal governments introduced some of the harshest anti-vaping laws in the world in late 2024. These laws were announced before this report was finalised. The data was never going to change their minds — it was just a tool to sell the narrative to the public.
This is evidence being shaped to fit policy, not the other way around.
So What’s the Alternative?
A public health strategy that:
Treats adults with respect.
Communicates relative risks honestly.
Uses regulation to improve safety, not drive people to the black market.
Puts reducing smoking deaths above scoring political points.
We can and should have conversations about youth access, product safety, and marketing. But we should also be telling the truth: vaping is a threat to smoking, not to public health. And that’s exactly why some in the old tobacco control world hate it so much.
Final Thought:
Queensland Health’s 2025 vaping report isn’t a roadmap to better outcomes — it’s a monument to moral panic. It prioritises ideological purity over saving lives.
We deserve better.
