“Tackling Tobacco” Isn’t a Solution — It’s Systemic Control Disguised as Care

Alan Gor 12 May 2025

In a country where 24,000 people die each year from smoking-related diseases, you’d hope our public health approach would be rooted in compassion, pragmatism, and evidence. Sadly, Australia’s Tackling Tobacco program, run by Cancer Council WA, is emblematic of how ideology continues to trump real solutions in the fight against tobacco harm.

On the surface, Tackling Tobacco sounds like a benevolent initiative. It offers to partner with community service organisations to embed smoking cessation practices into their everyday operations. The goal? To “achieve organisation-wide change” and help clients quit smoking through a structured six-step framework.

But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find something deeply unsettling. Rather than empowering people, this program imposes a top-down model of behaviour change that monitors, disciplines, and subtly coerces. It promotes a culture where smoking isn’t just discouraged, it’s policed.

Let’s be clear: no one is arguing against the need to reduce smoking rates. Tobacco kills. But how we go about helping people quit matters. And this program, like so many others in Australia, is hopelessly stuck in the past, clinging to abstinence-only ideology while denying the science and success of harm reduction.

Ignoring the Best Tool We Have

Australia’s public health establishment, including those behind Tackling Tobacco, continues to wage war on nicotine vaping — the very tool that is helping millions of people around the world quit deadly cigarettes.

Look at the UK, where the National Health Service offers free vape kits to people trying to quit smoking. Or Sweden, which has the lowest smoking rate in Europe and male lung cancer rates 41% below the EU average, thanks in large part to their embrace of safer nicotine alternatives like snus and vaping.

Here, in contrast, the approach is prohibition. Legal access to nicotine vapes is functionally impossible for the average Australian, with prescription-only pathways riddled with red tape, delays, and stigma. Meanwhile, the black market is booming, fuelling 240+ firebombings and handing control to organised crime.

Programs like Tackling Tobacco say they want to help “priority populations” — vulnerable people living with mental health conditions, trauma, homelessness, or disadvantage. But those very groups are being denied access to the most effective, practical and affordable tool to quit: vaping.

Why? Because organisations like Cancer Council WA refuse to acknowledge it.

Instead, they continue to push the same limited options: pharmaceutical cessation aids, brief counselling, and “smoke-free policies” that may sound good on paper but fail time and again in the real world, especially for people who have been smoking for decades and have tried everything else.

From Support to Surveillance

The six pillars of the Tackling Tobacco program may seem benign at first glance: “Committed Leadership,” “Comprehensive Smoking Policies,” “Supportive Systems,” “Training,” “Monitoring,” and “Consistent Quit Support.”

But in practice, these steps often result in:

•Exclusion: Smokers who rely on community services may feel unwelcome or judged, particularly if they’re not ready or able to quit.

•Policing: Staff may feel compelled to “manage” their clients’ smoking behaviour, even when it detracts from their primary role as support workers.

•Surveillance: “Monitoring and data collection” raises serious questions about privacy and the treatment of clients as case studies rather than people.

•Moral pressure: Staff and clients alike may face subtle coercion to comply with abstinence-only messaging.

Instead of creating welcoming, empowering environments, this framework risks turning community organisations into gatekeepers of behaviour, undermining trust, and pushing people away from services they desperately need.

Where is the Real Choice?

The most egregious omission in Tackling Tobacco is the complete absence of harm reduction.

In 2023, an international coalition of over 100 tobacco control and public health experts published a consensus statement urging governments to integrate vaping and other safer alternatives into cessation strategies, particularly for high-risk populations. But in Australia, such views are dismissed — even when they come from respected experts, including doctors and Order of Australia recipients.

Consumers, the people most affected, are also ignored. Their lived experience with vaping, their testimonies of finally quitting after years of failed attempts, are cast aside in favour of moral panic and distorted statistics. Meanwhile, the same tobacco products responsible for 24,000 deaths a year remain widely available — and taxed so high that they now place enormous financial stress on low-income people.

It’s Time to Change Course

If we want to save lives, we need a new approach. One that:

•Embraces harm reduction, including regulated access to nicotine vaping products

•Treats smokers with dignity, not as problems to be managed

•Recognises the failure of abstinence-only policies

•Prioritises evidence and outcomes over ideology and optics

Community services should absolutely support people to quit smoking, but not by becoming enforcers of moral policy. Not by ignoring safer alternatives. Not by perpetuating stigma.

If Cancer Council WA and governments around the country are serious about reducing smoking rates, they must stop ignoring the tools that work. They must start trusting the people they claim to serve. Because right now, programs like Tackling Tobacco are doing more harm than good.