When Defending the Narrative Matters More Than the Evidence

Australia’s tobacco control debate has reached an extraordinary point.

A recent commentary by Simon Chapman, Sam Egger and Becky Freeman, Problems in Comparing Tobacco Regulatory Models and Excise When Only Two Countries Are Considered, presents itself as a scientific contribution to an important policy discussion. On closer inspection, however, it reads more like a defence of an increasingly troubled policy model than a genuine attempt to examine the realities now unfolding across Australia’s nicotine market.

The article was written in response to growing questions about Australia’s tobacco excise strategy, the explosion of illicit tobacco and whether alternative approaches, such as those pursued in New Zealand and Sweden, deserve more serious consideration. Yet rather than asking whether current policies might be contributing to the problems Australia now faces, the authors largely argue for more of the same.

That should concern anyone who believes public policy should be judged by outcomes rather than intentions.

The paper itself acknowledges that illicit tobacco is now being sold openly through retail outlets and that authorities have been forced to close hundreds of tobacco stores. Pause and consider what that means. This is not a minor enforcement issue or a small policy inconvenience; it is a black market operating in plain sight.

Australia now has one of the largest illicit tobacco markets in the developed world. Organised crime has become deeply embedded in the nicotine supply chain, while firebombings, extortion and violent turf wars have become regular features of the nightly news.

Yet the commentary treats this largely as an enforcement problem.

There is remarkably little reflection on whether policy settings themselves may have helped create the incentives driving consumers into illicit markets. That omission is extraordinary because markets do not emerge in a vacuum. Consumers respond to incentives. When legal products become increasingly expensive and increasingly difficult to access while demand remains strong, alternative supply chains inevitably emerge.

This is not controversial economics. It is basic human behaviour.

The commentary repeatedly points to historically low smoking prevalence and increasing quit proportions as evidence that Australia’s tobacco control policies remain successful. But this raises an important question: how confident can we be that traditional measures accurately reflect what is happening in a market increasingly characterised by illicit products?

Legal tobacco sales have collapsed.

Excise revenue has collapsed.

Record quantities of illicit tobacco are being seized.

Wastewater data suggests nicotine consumption remains substantial.

Organised crime has flourished.

Yet we are repeatedly told that everything remains on track.

At some point, policymakers and academics need to ask whether the indicators they rely upon still provide a complete picture. If a growing proportion of tobacco and nicotine consumption occurs outside the legal market, then legal sales data becomes a much less reliable proxy for actual behaviour.

This possibility barely receives serious consideration in the paper. Instead, the narrative of success is simply repeated.

The commentary also aims to make comparisons with New Zealand. The authors note that smoking declines have recently slowed while vaping remains popular and that youth vaping rates are substantially higher than Australia’s.

This framing is highly selective.

New Zealand has achieved one of the fastest declines in smoking prevalence seen anywhere in the developed world during the period in which vaping became widely available. That fact alone deserves serious analysis.

A newly published paper in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific by Robert Beaglehole, Ruth Bonita, and Ben Youdan makes the omission even more striking. The authors found that the decline in smoking in New Zealand accelerated dramatically from 2018–19, with smoking prevalence falling at around five times the previous rate. The timing coincided with the rapid uptake of vaping and New Zealand’s explicit embrace of tobacco harm reduction.

The findings are perhaps best illustrated by the authors’ own data.

The graph tells a story that is difficult to ignore. During the early post-FCTC period and even after annual tobacco tax increases were introduced, smoking prevalence declined steadily but relatively slowly. Then something changed.

From around 2018–19, coinciding with the rapid uptake of vaping and New Zealand’s explicit embrace of tobacco harm reduction, the decline in smoking accelerated dramatically.

The effect was particularly striking among Māori communities, which have historically carried one of the highest burdens of smoking-related disease. Māori daily smoking prevalence fell from around 31% in 2018–19 to approximately 15% by 2024–25, a near halving in just six years. Among all adults, smoking fell to around 6–7%, placing New Zealand among the countries with the lowest smoking rates in the world.

The authors of the Lancet paper are appropriately cautious. They do not claim that vaping alone caused these extraordinary declines. However, they conclude that vaping likely made an important contribution and that New Zealand’s experience provides valuable lessons for tobacco control internationally.

For those wanting a much deeper dive into the New Zealand data and what may be driving these extraordinary declines in smoking, I highly recommend reading Arielle Selya’s excellent Substack article, What’s Going on with Smoking and Vaping?

She carefully examines the evidence, the timing of the declines, and the role that vaping may have played in accelerating reductions in smoking prevalence. It’s a thoughtful, data-driven analysis that provides important context often missing from the Australian debate.

A worthwhile read for anyone genuinely interested in where the evidence is leading, rather than where pre-existing narratives would like it to go.

This is precisely what is missing from the Chapman et al commentary.

Rather than engaging seriously with one of the most significant public health successes in recent years, the paper focuses heavily on youth vaping prevalence while giving comparatively little attention to the extraordinary reductions in smoking that occurred during exactly the same period.

The New Zealand experience does not prove that vaping is a panacea, nor does it mean there are no risks associated with youth nicotine use. But it does fundamentally challenge the suggestion that regulated access to lower-risk nicotine products undermines tobacco control. If anything, it suggests the opposite: that harm reduction and traditional tobacco control measures can work together to accelerate declines in smoking, including among populations that have historically borne the greatest burden of tobacco-related disease.

When one of the world’s most remarkable reductions in smoking coincides with the adoption of tobacco harm reduction policies, the appropriate scientific response is curiosity and investigation, not an attempt to explain the success away.

Perhaps the most unconvincing aspect of the commentary is its suggestion that Australia cannot be described as having a prohibitionist approach because Australians make hundreds of millions of visits to pharmacies every year.

This argument borders on absurd.

The question is not whether pharmacies exist. The question is whether regulated vaping products are practically accessible, affordable and acceptable substitutes for products available through illicit channels.

Many adult consumers report that pharmacy products are expensive, difficult to obtain and often fail to meet their needs. The enormous size of Australia’s illicit vape market strongly suggests that many consumers have reached the same conclusion.

A legal pathway that few people use is not evidence of successful regulation. It may be evidence of regulatory failure.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the commentary is that its policy prescription appears remarkably familiar: more enforcement, more restrictions, tighter retailer controls, continued defence of extremely high excise and continued resistance to safer nicotine alternatives.

There is remarkably little curiosity about whether the current strategy itself might be contributing to the very problems it is now trying to solve.

Good science should be willing to question assumptions when real-world outcomes diverge from expectations. Instead, this paper appears to begin with the assumption that the policy model remains fundamentally correct and then works backwards from that conclusion.

This matters because public health depends upon intellectual honesty.

When evidence changes, policy should adapt.

When outcomes differ from what was predicted, assumptions should be revisited.

When black markets flourish, organised crime expands, and consumers increasingly operate outside the regulated system, policymakers and academics should be asking difficult questions.

Instead, too much of Australia’s tobacco control debate now seems focused on defending an existing narrative, and that is dangerous.

Because when defending the narrative becomes more important than examining the evidence, science risks becoming advocacy.

Australia’s nicotine landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s experience suggests that combining traditional tobacco control with regulated access to lower-risk nicotine products may accelerate the decline in smoking rather than hinder it.

The question is whether Australia’s public health institutions and academics are willing to examine that evidence with an open mind.

Increasingly, it appears that they are not.