Leaves – Smoke Master

Australia’s Backwards Nicotine Policy Leaves Cigarettes Legal and Safer Alternatives Restricted

admin — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:32:07 +0000

Australia has created one of the strangest nicotine markets in the developed world. Combustible cigarettes—the product responsible for the overwhelming majority of tobacco-related disease—remain legally available through ordinary retailers, while access to lower-risk alternatives has become progressively more difficult. The latest example is nicotine pouches.

From 24 July 2026, the Therapeutic Goods Administration removed the remaining consumer pathways for accessing nicotine pouches. Personal importation is no longer permitted, doctors cannot prescribe them through the Special Access or Authorised Prescriber schemes, and pharmacists cannot compound them. No nicotine pouch is currently included on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods, meaning there is effectively no lawful consumer supply.

The contrast could hardly be clearer: cigarettes remain on shelves while a tobacco-free product that produces neither smoke nor aerosol has effectively disappeared from the legal market. For tobacco harm reduction advocates, this represents Australia’s central policy problem—not insufficient regulation, but a risk hierarchy turned upside down.

Sweden shows what Australia is missing

Sweden is renowned for moving in the opposite direction. Instead of expecting every smoker to abandon nicotine entirely, it has allowed non-combustible alternatives to compete with cigarettes. Longstanding snus use has been joined by tobacco-free nicotine pouches, helping create a diverse market of products that avoid combustion.

Recent Swedish data put daily smoking at exceptionally low levels, while Smoke Free Sweden’s Power in a Pouch report argues that nicotine pouches have become particularly important among former smokers, especially women. Its survey found 26% of male and 28% of female ex-smokers identifying pouches as their most effective quitting aid. While a 2025 Cochrane review found no short-term serious harms in the small studies available and reductions in some biomarkers of tobacco-smoke exposure among smokers allocated to pouches.

Britain shows why consumer choice matters

The UK provides another useful example of a diversified harm-reduction market. Vaping remains the dominant alternative, supported by strong evidence for cessation. The latest Cochrane living review examined 104 studies involving more than 30,000 adults and concluded that nicotine vapes help more people quit smoking than conventional nicotine replacement therapy.

Nicotine pouches mostly attract smokers and recent ex-smokers. Action on Smoking and Health’s 2026 survey found current pouch use at 5.1% among smokers, 2.1% among ex-smokers and just 0.3% among never-smokers. Among people who had quit smoking during the previous year, pouch use reached 5.8%.

These figures suggest that the product currently appeals disproportionately to people with smoking histories rather than never-smokers. That matters because smokers tend to prefer vaping because it replicates inhalation and hand-to-mouth behaviour. But others clearly prefer an oral product that requires no device, produces no vapour and can be used discreetly. The more acceptable alternatives available, the greater the chance of finding something that can replace cigarettes for everyone.

Australia’s restrictions are feeding a massive black market

Australia is moving in the opposite direction while also experiencing an extraordinary shift toward illicit supply. Experimental modelling published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that total nicotine consumption increased by almost 40% between 2017 and 2025, despite population growth of only 14%. Over the same period, the estimated proportion supplied through illicit sources rose from 12% to 80%.

The ABS stresses that these estimates are not definite because wastewater can measure overall nicotine consumption but cannot determine which products produced it. Administrative and survey data must therefore be used to allocate consumption across cigarettes, vapes and other nicotine products.

Nevertheless, the underlying signal is difficult to ignore. Legal tobacco quantities fell to less than one-third of their 2017 level while total estimated nicotine consumption rose. The ABS concludes that substitution towards cheaper illicit products has more than offset declining legal consumption. Against that background, eliminating another lawful smoke-free option looks less like consumer protection and more like handing an established illicit market another product category.

New Zealand provides the most relevant comparison

Australia does not need to look as far as Sweden for an alternative regulatory model. Neighbouring New Zealand has historically regulated vaping as a legal consumer product rather than forcing consumers through Australia’s much narrower system. A 2025 study in Addiction compared smoking and vaping trends in the two countries between 2016 and 2023.

Daily smoking in New Zealand declined from 14.5% to 6.8%, compared with 12.2% to 8.3% in Australia. The researchers also found faster smoking reductions among lower socioeconomic groups and Indigenous populations in New Zealand.

The observational study cannot prove that vaping regulation alone caused this difference. But it provides a valuable natural comparison between neighbouring countries with similar conventional tobacco-control policies and sharply different approaches to safer nicotine alternatives. Importantly (and in this case mostly overlooked), consumer accounts indicate that Australia’s harsh restrictions on safer alternatives are where the problem lies.

Meanwhile, New Zealand itself does not yet operate an unrestricted legal nicotine-pouch market; oral nicotine products remain subject to specific medicines and psychoactive-substance rules. The stronger lesson from New Zealand is therefore about vaping: legal, regulated alternatives can coexist with faster declines in smoking.

Australia needs to put risk back at the centre

Australia’s problem is not that cigarettes are insufficiently regulated. It is that its nicotine framework repeatedly makes safer legal alternatives harder to obtain while illicit suppliers remain willing to provide whatever consumers want.

No one is implying that nicotine pouches should be sold freely and free of regulations. They should have enforceable standards covering nicotine content, ingredients, packaging and youth access. Manufacturers should be required to substantiate claims, and regulators should continue gathering long-term oral-health and epidemiological evidence. But none of that requires eliminating legal access.

A rational tobacco harm reduction strategy would put combustible cigarettes under the greatest regulatory and fiscal pressure, while creating controlled pathways for lower-risk products capable of replacing them. Australia has instead preserved the easiest legal route to the most dangerous product, restricted vaping and now effectively closed legal access to nicotine pouches—all while an enormous illicit nicotine economy has developed around those restrictions.

Sweden demonstrates the potential value of consumer choice. Britain shows different alternatives can appeal to different smokers. New Zealand shows that regulated vaping will lead to rapid declines in smoking. Australia’s approach remains the reverse: make safer products difficult to obtain, leave cigarettes readily available, then fight the black market that predictably fills the gap. If the objective is genuinely to reduce smoking-related disease, that hierarchy needs to be turned the right way up.

Australia Insists on Opting for Nicotine Prohibition, Despite Failing Miserably

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The Record That Decides Whether Weed Leaves Schedule I Just Needed 294 Corrections. A Few Reversed What Witnesses Said.

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:36:34 +0000

Part V of our coverage of the federal rescheduling case. Part IV covered the post-hearing briefs.

294 fixes across 2,533 pages is roughly one every nine pages, and most are spelling and speaker names. A handful did something else: they changed the meaning, sometimes to its opposite.

For six weeks, one version of the federal marijuana rescheduling record had a Tennessee investigator testifying that cannabis shipments were arriving with lab paperwork showing illegal levels of delta-9 THC.

What he said was the opposite. The paperwork claimed legal levels. That was his point: the certificates travel with the shipment, they say the product is compliant, and when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s own lab tests it, the delta-9 comes back much higher. One missing syllable, on page 1823, and the sentence argued against itself.

That was one of 294 corrections Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius ordered before the DEA published the full transcript of its eleven-day rescheduling hearing this week. The parties proposed them, the government included, and Julius signed the order on August 20.

Most are exactly what you would expect from live transcription. Misspelled surnames, speaker labels attached to the wrong lawyer dozens of times, “Torridon Law LLC” corrected to “Torridon Law PLLC” on the opening page of nearly every day. A few are just funny, and Marijuana Moment collected those when the order came out: “pubic” for “public,” “anal” for “analysis,” and two places where “nubs” should have read “nuggs.”

A small number are not clerical at all. In those, the record had a witness saying the opposite of what they said.

The Corrections That Changed the Meaning

The rescheduling itself, backwards. On day ten, page 2070, Pueblo emergency physician Karen Randall warned that moving marijuana would change how the public sees it. The transcript had her describing the move as going from “a CS-III to a III.” The corrected version reads “CS-I to a III.” In the official record of a hearing convened to decide whether marijuana leaves Schedule I, the direction of the move came out wrong.

A conflict of interest, admitted or omitted. On day three, page 830, a witness being questioned about a potential conflict said he would have to check his professional timeline to see whether it had been “inadvertently omitted” that he had one, adding that it was “certainly not through any conscious obfuscation.” The uncorrected transcript read “admitted.” One word, and the sentence describes the opposite situation.

Perception of harm, up or down. Randall again, on page 2135, describing how the perception of harm has “decreased dramatically” over the last decade, especially among children. The record had her saying it increased, which would have made the rest of her argument incoherent.

Pure or impure. On day five, page 1222, Bertha Madras walked the judge through the questions pharmacology asks of any drug. One of them is whether the substance is contaminated: “Is it impure, with microbes, with chemicals, with heavy metals, pesticides, insecticides.” The transcript had “pure.”

The distinction the witness was making. On day six, page 1482, Ed Wood of DUID Victim Voices explained why an unscientific per se THC limit convicts unimpaired drivers and acquits impaired ones, and that Colorado’s permissible-inference structure solves half of it. The uncorrected version collapsed his closing line into “with a per se law,” erasing the distinction his entire answer rested on. The correction restores it: “with a per se, permissible inference, law.”

Two more that Marijuana Moment flagged when the order came out belong in the same category. On page 284, a lawyer asked whether dispensary cannabis is tested “to make sure there’s no adulterants,” and the record dropped the “no.” And a line rendered as the statement “This is a medication.” turned out to be the question “This is a medication?”

Why It Matters, and How Much

Perspective is in order. Court reporters work fast, and 294 corrections across 2,533 pages come out to about one every nine pages, which is not a scandal. The parties proposed them, which is how the process is designed to work, and Julius ordered them under the regulation that governs it. Most of the reversals are obvious enough in context that a careful reader would have caught them. The system did its job. The record was corrected before Julius issues his recommendation.

What is worth sitting with is the six weeks in between. The tribunal emailed uncorrected daily transcripts to counsel and to some of the parties as the hearing ran, a fact that surfaced in open court when the government tried to strike a witness for having read them. Those were the pages available while the parties drafted the post-hearing briefs that would become their final arguments to Julius, and while reporters, this outlet included, covered the case.

In a proceeding this technical, the difference between legal and illegal, increased and decreased, admitted and omitted, pure and impure is the difference between a witness’s point and its opposite. That is the argument for a correction process, and it is also the argument for checking any quotation from this hearing against the version the DEA posted this week.

Julius will issue a recommended decision to DEA Administrator Terrance Cole. There is no date for it. Whatever he recommends, the record he decides from now says what the witnesses actually said.

How we reported this: High Times compared Judge Julius’ August 20 order correcting the transcript against the corrected transcripts of all eleven hearing days, which the DEA has posted publicly on its rescheduling docket page. Page numbers refer to the continuous pagination of the hearing record, which runs from 1 to 2,533. On the published version, corrections appear in red and deleted text is struck through.

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