The Deadly Tobacco Drug War Down Under
Since March of last year, the Australian state of Victoria has been rocked by a series of arsons and firebombings. Some of the targets are victims of extortion; others are caught in an escalating turf war between rival gangs. Two men with links to organized crime have been publicly murdered, one in a broad-daylight shooting at a shopping mall in a Melbourne suburb. Violent conflict is not unexpected in organized crime, but what is unusual is the drug at the center of this conflict: nicotine.
This tobacco turf war has been widely covered in Australian media but generally ignored elsewhere. In international public health discourse, Australia is often upheld as a model for mainstream tobacco control—lauded for its graphic warnings on cigarette packs, extremely high cigarette taxes, and strict prohibitions on e-cigarettes. Recent events, however, demonstrate how these policies can backfire.
“There’s just a lot of shock and disbelief,” says James Martin, a criminologist at Deakin University in Melbourne. “The issues that we’ve been dealing with for a long time with more traditional, hardcore illegal drugs have suddenly become issues for a legal drug.” Martin describes Australian tobacco policy as increasingly turning into a form of “de facto prohibition.”
Australia’s Road to Prohibition
Sky-high taxes were the first driver of Australia’s illicit tobacco market. Figures from the World Health Organization rank Australian cigarette prices as the highest in the world, the equivalent of $23 for a 20-pack. Tobacco taxes now account for over 65 percent of the retail price of cigarettes in Australian shops.
Predictably, while Australian smoking rates have fallen over much of the same period that tobacco taxes have risen, the share of tobacco sold illegally to evade those taxes has spiked. “In 2020–21, we seized the highest amount of illicit tobacco ever recorded,” the Australian Taxation Office reported last October. “Despite these efforts and in contrast to a shrinking market, illicit tobacco is increasing and has doubled to over 10% of the market.”
An Illicit Tobacco Taskforce formed in 2018 has seen border seizures rise by over 300 percent, indicating a massive increase in supply. Industry figures suggest that illicit sources may now comprise nearly a quarter of Australian sales (though it’s worth noting that tobacco companies have a lobbying interest in promoting high estimates).
The second driver of nicotine black markets is Australia’s extremely restrictive policies on vaping. Since 2008, it has been illegal to purchase e-cigarettes without a medical prescription as an aid for quitting smoking. “The problem is, there are very few doctors that will write scripts for nicotine,” says Colin Mendelsohn, founding chairman of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association. “Then you’ve got to find a pharmacy that will sell it to you….Very few pharmacies stock them. And those that do have a very small range.”
Like most drug prohibitions, these measures haven’t stopped people from buying the products they want. There are 1.8 million vapers in Australia and about nine out of 10 of them source their vapes illegally. Some purchase e-cigarette components and import nicotine liquid from abroad, but there is also a thriving black market for disposable vapes manufactured cheaply in China. As Rohan Pike, former leader of the Australian B
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