Australia and Brazil: Nicotine’s Accidental Laboratories

Brazil banned vapes. Australia turned them into pharmacy products. Both reveal what happens when the law is narrower than demand.

In Porto Alegre’s northern neighbourhoods, a vendor takes orders on WhatsApp. On the other side of the screen, the catalogue looks like a clandestine storefront: 47 flavours of disposable vapes, from citrus fruits to synthetic desserts.

Delivery is promised within two hours, by motorcycle, with no tax ID, no company registration, no receipt, and almost no paper trail.

“Don’t worry, it’s all original,” an automated message replies.

On apps, age restrictions often amount to little more than a click confirming that the buyer is over 18. Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency, Anvisa, prohibits the sale of these products. The market does not argue. It does not wait for authorisation. It simply delivers.

In Brazil, vapes, pods, and other electronic nicotine devices cannot be sold legally. The country banned them in 2009 and reaffirmed the prohibition in 2024, after years of regulatory dispute and pressure from industry groups, medical organisations, consumer advocates, and harm-reduction specialists.

The ban is not symbolic. It covers almost the entire commercial life of the product: manufacture, importation, advertising, distribution, and sale. In 2024, Anvisa not only preserved the prohibition but widened the regulatory perimeter around devices, refills, accessories, and online promotion. The result is a legal architecture that leaves little room for formal market entry — and enormous room for informal circulation.

The issue, then, is not regulation versus no regulation. Total prohibition is itself a form of regulation — one that, in Brazil’s case, appears to shift much of the market’s practical control away from the state and toward informal sellers, digital platforms, and smuggling routes.

A harm-reduction approach would begin from a different premise: nicotine products should be regulated according to risk, use, age access, and enforceability, rather than treated as a single moral category.

The dispute is not only about whether vapes should be legal. It is about who controls the existing nicotine market. Brazil enters this new phase with two conflicting inheritances: a country long regarded as a global reference in tobacco control, and one of the largest illicit cigarette markets in the Americas.

But Brazil is no longer the only country confronting this contradiction.

Across the Pacific, Australia chose a different restrictive architecture. Rather than allowing a consumer vape market, it channelled legal access into a therapeutic pharmacy model: nicotine vaping would be treated less as an ordinary consumer product than as a tool for smoking cessation or nicotine-dependence management.

On paper, the Australian system appears almost opposite to Brazil’s. Brazil pursued prohibition. Australia pursued medicalisation.

Yet both countries are confronting similar pressures: informal supply chains, digital distribution networks, weakened practical oversight, and markets adapting faster than regulators can control them.

The comparison matters because it shifts the question. The issue is not only what each country intended to regulate, but what their policies left outside the legal door.

Brazil: The Ban That Entered the App

With more than 213 million people, Brazil turns seemingly modest percentages into mass-market phenomena. What might remain a niche in smaller countries can quickly become a logistics chain, an informal resale network, a tax dispute, and a nationwide supply system.

In markets of this size, products used repeatedly rarely disappear simply because they have been banned. They leave the storefront. They enter the app.

Long before the vape boom, Brazil had already shown how difficult it was to control the traditional cigarette market. Electronic devices did not create nicotine informality in the country. They found an infrastructure already in place: smuggling routes, shadow distribution networks, established demand, and limited state capacity for enforcement.

In 2025, roughly one in every three cigarettes consumed in Brazil circulated outside formal tax, regulatory, and health-surveillance systems. Public authorities were not competing only with legal manufacturers, but also with packs sold at improvised stands, small neighbourhood markets, and kiosks supplied by routes that cross borders before reaching major cities.

Brazil shares nearly 16,900 kilometres of land borders with ten South American countries. Beyond the border line itself lies the country’s 150-kilometre Border Strip, where illegal cargo can be broken up, stored, transferred, and redirected toward urban markets.

A KPMG report commissioned by the tobacco industry has estimated that Brazil accounts for more than half of the illicit cigarette market among surveyed Latin American countries. Federal enforcement officials now describe electronic cigarettes as part of that same criminal opportunity.

The point is not that vapes and illicit cigarettes are identical markets. They are not. Their consumers, aesthetics, technologies, and channels of circulation differ. But they meet inside the same structural weakness: a large nicotine market where prohibition, price gaps, porous borders, digital platforms, and limited enforcement capacity can turn restricted products into ordinary commodities.

Brazil’s informal nicotine market is no longer peripheral. It has become part of the system.

Australia: The Pharmacy Door and the Market Outside

Australia increasingly faces its own version of that contradiction.

The Australian government attempted to address vaping not through outright prohibition, but through therapeutic gatekeeping. Vapes would be treated as medical products rather than consumer products. Pharmacies would replace vape shops. Doctors and pharmacists would become the new access points.

But the real market evolved differently.

Consumers did not stop wanting convenience, flavour variety, familiar products, immediate access, or social accessibility simply because the state reclassified vaping as therapeutic.

The result has been the emergence of two systems beside each other: a tightly regulated, pharmacy-centred legal pathway, and an unofficial market of tobacconists, imported disposables, Telegram groups, under-the-counter retail, social media promotion, and organised criminal supply networks.

Australia, therefore, produced a contradiction remarkably similar to Brazil’s: a formal regulatory system existing beside a rapidly adapting informal market.

The pharmacy-only model also faces a quieter problem: legal access can exist on paper while remaining narrow, inconsistent, or inconvenient in practice.

Many pharmacies do not stock nicotine vaping products at all. Others stock only limited devices, limited nicotine strengths, or a very small selection of products. Some pharmacists remain reluctant to participate because of uncertainty, reputational concerns, lack of commercial incentive, or personal opposition to vaping itself.

For many smokers, the legal pathway exists technically, but not practically.

Obtaining products may mean finding a participating pharmacy, navigating consultations or prescriptions, locating available stock, accepting limited product options, and repeatedly dealing with supply inconsistency.

A smoker attempting to move away from cigarettes does not experience regulation as an abstract public-health framework. They experience it behaviourally: Can I reliably obtain a product that works for me?

When the answer becomes uncertain, consumers often move toward the parallel market.

That is one of the strongest comparative insights between Brazil and Australia. Brazil may show the limits of prohibition. Australia may show the limits of medicalisation when the legal pathway becomes narrower than demand.

The Smuggling of Words

The new clandestine market is not built only on routes, warehouses, and border crossings. It is also built on words.

To evade platform filters and enforcement, pods and electronic cigarettes often appear under other names. On digital marketplaces, they have been advertised as “air fresheners,” “essential oils,” “diffusers,” “essences,” and even “kitchen items.” On delivery apps, some sellers list devices under categories such as “natural supplements.”

The logic is simple: change the language to keep the market moving.

What once depended mainly on border routes and informal retail now also moves through search terms, closed profiles, temporary posts, messaging apps, and delivery systems.

The market no longer behaves like a traditional black market. Increasingly, it behaves like platform commerce.

This is what makes the modern nicotine debate so difficult for governments: the market is no longer only geographic. It is algorithmic.

The same digital infrastructure used for food delivery, social media advertising, and online retail can also be used to distribute restricted nicotine products.

In both Brazil and Australia, regulators are attempting to control these markets with twentieth-century enforcement structures while the markets themselves evolve through twenty-first-century digital systems.

The result is constant adaptation. Each new restriction generates new workarounds. Each enforcement action produces new distribution methods. The market mutates faster than regulation itself.

The Two Bodies in the Room

That redistribution of control has become most politically charged around adolescents.

Among Brazilian students aged 13 to 17, the share who had tried e-cigarettes rose sharply between 2019 and 2024. Similar fears now shape Australian policy debates around youth vaping, disposable devices, flavours, and social-media visibility.

For public-health authorities, the concern is not simply nicotine itself, but renormalisation: the possibility that a generation raised after decades of anti-smoking campaigns could once again be drawn into nicotine use.

Yet adolescents are not the only bodies in the room.

Brazil still has millions of adult smokers already exposed to the cumulative harms of combustible cigarettes. Australia does too.

A policy built only around preventing youth initiation risks leaves adult smokers in the most harmful form of nicotine use. A policy built only around harm reduction risks normalising a new nicotine market among adolescents.

Neither problem disappears through moral certainty alone.

This is where both countries become accidental laboratories. One pursued prohibition; the other pursued therapeutic containment. Both reveal the same underlying tension: when legal systems disconnect from demand, markets reorganise outside them.

This does not mean nicotine products should circulate without restriction. Nor does it mean regulation cannot fail. It can be captured by commercial interests, weakened by bureaucracy, hollowed out by poor enforcement, or designed in ways that exclude the smokers it claims to help.

But the alternative to regulation is not necessarily control.

In both Brazil and Australia, the alternative increasingly appears to be the informal market: less traceability, less accountability, weaker age verification, less transparency, and weaker public oversight.

The deeper question is no longer only whether governments oppose nicotine use. It is whether they can still govern markets that emerge online, spread socially, adapt algorithmically, and only later appear in the physical world.

Brazil banned vaping. Australia medicalised it.

Both may now be revealing the same uncomfortable truth: when law becomes narrower than demand, markets do not disappear.

They mutate.

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Comparative Fact Sheet: Brazil and Australia

Population

Brazil: 213 million people in 2025.

Australia: roughly 27 million people in 2025.

Why it matters: Brazil’s scale turns even modest prevalence rates into mass-market phenomena. Australia, by contrast, shows that a smaller population and stronger border controls do not necessarily insulate a country from illicit-market pressure.

Youth Vaping

Brazil: according to official data, 29.6 percent of adolescents aged 13–17 had tried electronic cigarettes in 2024.

Australia: national surveys have also shown substantial experimentation among adolescents and young adults, especially during the disposable-vape era, despite tighter restrictions and import controls.

Why it matters: Both countries reveal the same political paradox: restrictive policy frameworks have not prevented significant youth experimentation.

Adult Use

Brazil: estimated daily adult e-cigarette use reached 2.6 percent in 2024, measured in state capitals only — roughly 4 million people.

Australia: adult vaping prevalence is substantially higher than Brazil’s, especially among younger adults and former smokers. Despite Australia’s pharmacy-only therapeutic framework, nicotine vaping had already become widely embedded among consumers before and during the current restrictions.

Why it matters: this creates a contradiction inside the Australian model: a formally therapeutic product now functioning socially as a mass consumer product.

Illicit Cigarette Trade

Brazil: 41.8 billion illicit cigarettes were consumed in 2025, representing an estimated illegal market share of 35.6 percent.

Australia: Australia is facing a rapidly expanding illicit tobacco market, driven in large part by high tobacco excise taxes and growing organised crime involvement. Illegal tobacco retailing has become increasingly visible, with illicit tobacconists operating openly in several cities. Firebombings, extortion, and turf conflicts linked to the tobacco trade have also become recurring national news stories.

Why it matters: Brazil’s illicit market is older and structurally embedded. Australia’s is newer, but expanding quickly and becoming politically destabilising. Both point to the same underlying principle: when price, restriction, and demand diverge too sharply, parallel markets emerge.

Geography and Borders

Brazil: 16,900 kilometres of land borders with ten South American countries.

Australia: an island nation with a far more controlled border environment.

Why it matters: This is perhaps the most politically revealing comparison. Brazil’s illicit nicotine market is often explained through porous borders, continental geography, and limited enforcement capacity. Australia lacks those structural vulnerabilities. Yet despite geographic isolation and heavy border policing, it has still developed a large illicit vape and tobacco market.

Australia, therefore, complicates the easy explanation that Brazil’s problem is only porous borders or weak state capacity. In both countries, illicit markets also reflect consumer demand, digital commerce, taxation pressures, and regulatory mismatch.

Enforcement

Brazil: 550,000 electronic cigarettes were seized in 2024.

Australia: authorities have expanded seizure operations against illicit vaping and tobacco imports, while state governments have carried out repeated raids on tobacconists and informal retailers.

Why it matters: In both countries, stronger enforcement has coincided with the continued expansion of illicit supply. High seizure numbers may signal state action, but they also reveal the scale and persistence of the market itself.

Public Opinion and Regulatory Legitimacy

Brazil: 58.8 percent of submissions to Anvisa’s public consultation opposed continuing the vape ban.

Australia: the policy debate has become increasingly polarised among public-health authorities, harm-reduction advocates, pharmacists, smokers, consumer groups, and enforcement agencies.

Australia has not held an equivalent public consultation producing a directly comparable figure. Still, dissatisfaction with the pharmacy-only framework has increasingly centred on limited access, uneven pharmacy participation, inconsistent supply, high prices, consumer inconvenience, and the growth of the illicit market.

Why it matters: both countries now face a growing legitimacy problem: a widening gap between official nicotine policy and actual market behaviour.

What the Comparison Reveals

Brazil and Australia chose radically different nicotine strategies. Brazil pursued prohibition. Australia pursued medicalisation.

Yet the numbers point toward a similar structural outcome: persistent consumer demand moving into informal, digitally adaptive, and increasingly difficult-to-control supply systems.

Brazil’s scale makes the phenomenon massive. Australia’s smaller size makes it politically embarrassing and revealing. If even a wealthy island nation with centralised border controls and a pharmacy-only framework cannot contain informal nicotine markets, the problem cannot be explained by porous borders or weak state capacity alone.

The comparison raises a broader question about suppression-based policy itself: what happens when the legal pathway becomes narrower than demand?