The $82 Billion Lesson Australia Refuses To Learn: Prohibition Always Fails

By Pippa Starr

9/11/2025

Australia is now living inside the exact criminal environment experts warned would form the moment government doubled down on prohibition, and the ACIC’s own numbers prove it.

According to new national intelligence reporting, the illicit tobacco trade has now exploded into one of the most violent and fastest-growing criminal markets in the country, costing $4 billion in 2023–24 alone.

Organised crime has now hit a record $82.3 billion annual economic impact, fuelled by the combustion of black-market tobacco and the rise of illegal vapes. This is not a surprise. This is exactly what prohibition produces. Every time. Everywhere.

Over 250 firebombings. Innocent people killed. Entire neighbourhoods caught inside turf wars. And this still does not include the billions flowing through illegal vapes – because government took legal consumer access away while leaving tobacco widely available.

They were warned.

Expert after expert. Consumer groups. Economists. Harm reduction academics. The vaping community. Industry. International evidence.All warned the Albanese Government that banning regulated adult vaping would not make nicotine disappear – it would simply gift the trade to syndicates.

They did it anyway.

Instead of regulating safer nicotine products like every other rational nation – they chose prohibition.

And now organised crime has done what organised crime always does: it filled the vacuum with astonishing speed, violence and scale. These syndicates are not “kids in a garage making juice”. These are multinational criminal enterprises – with logistics, finance networks, encrypted tech platforms and distribution pipelines more sophisticated than many legitimate corporations.

They are thriving because prohibition gives them monopoly power.

The bitter irony?

Government now claims billions are needed for hospitals, schools and public safety.

Those billions? They literally handed to organised crime… by blocking regulated legal markets for harm-reduction vaping products.

The lesson is not complicated.

This is exactly what happened with alcohol prohibition. This is what happened with cannabis prohibition, and now it is happening with nicotine.

When legal demand exists, banning the legal supply never eliminates the market, it just transfers it to criminals who don’t check ID, don’t pay tax, don’t follow safety standards and don’t care about community safety.

Australia can stop pretending we weren’t told how this ends.

Harm reduction is not just a health principle – it’s crime prevention policy.

If government wants less firebombings… less black market money laundering… less teenage recruitment… less organised crime empire building…

Then stop manufacturing a criminal economy.

Stop prohibition.

Regulate vaping sensibly.

Because as these reports show in horrifying detail, the cost of refusing harm reduction is now being paid in blood, tax revenue, community safety, and lost social trust.

The evidence is in.

Prohibition failed.