A Letter From a Future Smoker

I quit smoking in 2022.

I was thirty-eight. I had smoked since I was nineteen. I had tried patches, gum, willpower, shame, apps, and promises to myself that lasted until the next stressful week. Nothing stuck for long.

Then I switched to vaping.

Within weeks, the coughing stopped. Within months, I wasn’t thinking about cigarettes at all. The ritual was still there, the nicotine was still there, but the smoke was gone. My GP didn’t throw a party, but she did say, “If you’re not smoking, that’s a win.”

I believed I was done with cigarettes for good.

In 2023 and 2024, the laws changed.

The messaging was confusing at first. We were told it wasn’t a ban. It was “medicalisation.” It was “closing loopholes.” It was “protecting children.” It was “world-leading reform.”

I don’t have children. I had a fifteen-year smoking habit and finally found a way out of it. But I understood the instinct to protect teenagers. I thought surely the system would still allow adults who had already quit to keep accessing what worked for them.

Gradually, access changed.

My local vape shop closed first. The owner told me the new framework made it impossible to operate. I switched to ordering online. That became harder. Then it stopped.

I tried the pharmacy route. I really did. I booked a consult. Paid the fee. Waited. The doctor I spoke to was polite but cautious. He said regulations were evolving. Supply was inconsistent. Nicotine strengths were limited. Flavours were limited. Everything felt provisional, like I was asking for something slightly illicit.

When I did get a prescription, the product wasn’t what I’d been using for years. Different device. Different nicotine delivery. Fewer options. It wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t the same.

The difference mattered more than I expected.

People who have never smoked think nicotine is the whole story. It isn’t. It’s the hand-to-mouth rhythm. The throat hit. The familiarity. The small personal ritual that replaces a much more dangerous one.

The pharmacy stock ran out twice in 2025. Each time, I waited weeks. Each time I told myself I could stretch what I had left.

Then one night, after a long shift and an argument at home, I stopped at a servo and bought a pack of cigarettes.

I told myself it was temporary.

They were expensive. They tasted worse than I remembered. But they were available. No appointment. No forms. No supply chain uncertainty.

Available matters.

I went back to vaping for a while when the stock returned. Then the pharmacy stopped carrying the brand entirely. They said demand was low. I wondered how much demand survives when access is that fragile.

By 2027, I was smoking again more days than I wasn’t.

No one in Parliament knows my name. No one at the press conferences mentions people like me. The story told publicly is about youth vaping rates, compliance operations, seizures, and enforcement wins. The language is always about protection.

I do not doubt that some teenagers vaped who shouldn’t have. I do not doubt that governments felt pressure to act. But I sometimes wonder whether anyone modelled what would happen to adults who had already switched.

When I quit in 2022, Australia’s daily smoking rate had been falling for years. We were told we were close to being a “smoke-free nation.” I felt like part of that progress. I was proud of it.

When access tightened, something subtle changed. Not overnight. Not dramatically. Just friction. Delay. Stigma. Reduced choice. Increased uncertainty.

Policy doesn’t have to ban something outright to make it functionally inaccessible. It only has to make it harder than the alternative.

Cigarettes, for all their cost and regulation, remained reliably obtainable.

In 2028, I smoked six to eight cigarettes a day. Fewer than I used to. More than I ever intended to again.

I don’t blame one person. I don’t think there was a secret meeting where someone decided former smokers didn’t matter. I think the focus narrowed. The political optics sharpened. “Cracking down” plays better than “managing trade-offs.”

When the reforms were announced, the phrase I heard most was “an abundance of caution.”

Caution for whom?

I was cautious once. I took the lower-risk option available to me. I moved away from combustion. I thought the system would support that direction of travel.

Instead, the direction was reversed.

There is a strange loneliness in relapsing when the public narrative insists things are improving. The statistics may still show long-term decline. They may show that youth vaping is falling. They may show enforcement success.

They will not show the night I stood outside in winter, lighting a cigarette I didn’t want, because the alternative had become bureaucratic and unreliable.

I do not need melodrama to describe what that feels like.

It feels ordinary.

It feels like a small erosion of something that once worked.

It feels like being counted in the wrong column of a spreadsheet.

If someone reading this in government believes the trade-off was worth it, I would ask only that they say so plainly. Say that some former smokers returning to cigarettes was an acceptable price for tighter control. Say that adult access was secondary to the optics of decisiveness.

I can live with disagreement. I struggle more with denial.

In 2022, I quit once.

Then access changed.

That is the whole story.

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Public health debates are often conducted in aggregates. Percentages. Prevalence curves. Enforcement statistics. But policy lives or dies in individual friction.

A system that makes the lower-risk option harder to obtain than the higher-risk one is not neutral. It is directional.

By 2028, we may congratulate ourselves on strong borders, strict rules, and falling youth vaping surveys. We may cite international treaties like the World Health Organisation and our commitments under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control as evidence of leadership.

But somewhere in that leadership will be people like the man at the kitchen table, who once moved away from smoke and quietly drifted back.

Not because he loved cigarettes.

Because access changed.

And policy, filtered through one ordinary life, became combustible again.