Prohibition always extracts a price. In Australia, Tim Andrews argues those paying the price are smokers denied access to safer alternatives and the community, which must live with flourishing illicit markets, violence driven by organized crime, and a massive loss of tax revenue. Joining RegWatch on GFN at the Global Forum on Nicotine in Warsaw, Poland, the Director of Consumer Issues at Americans for Tax Reform and Tholos Foundation examines the human and economic costs of prohibition. He challenges the moral authority of a tobacco control movement he says puts ideology ahead of smokers’ lives.
Featuring:
TIM ANDREWS
Director of Consumer Issues
Americans for Tax Reform & Tholos Foundation
@Tim_Andrews
prohibitiondoesnotwork.com
Transcription:
GFN interview — Tim Andrews
Global Forum on Nicotine 2026
Brent Stafford 0:00:05
You're from Australia, right?
Tim Andrews 0:00:06
Yes.
Brent Stafford 0:00:07
And what was the programme that you did there? Interestingly enough, we just had We just had Dr. Joe in, and he mentioned that you were one of the people that ensnarled him. And Colin, Dr. Mendelsohn has been on the show many times. We had Rohan Pike on about two months ago. We had Alex Wodak on again, and Dr. Carolyn Beaumount, she was on again too.
So we've been really covering this Australia thing well. Help us understand what's happening in Australia today and how that reflects back to when you first started in Australia.
Tim Andrews 0:00:50
Australia is a textbook example of what not to do. If you want to use Australia for anything, it's as an example of do the exact opposite because it is a complete policy failure, an absolute disaster about everything. textbook learning example of how not to do policy. We've seen statistics that came out yesterday that 80% of the nicotine market in Australia is illegal.
We already know about 97% of the e-cigarette market is illicit. Smoking rates have not just failed to go down, but total nicotine consumption has increased. We've seen over 250 firebombings. We've seen multiple murders because of just how lucrative the drug trade is. I was in Australia recently. Everyone was just using illegal products.
It is so widespread, and this comes with real harms. It's not just that, you know, okay, people are using illicit. What are the harms, first of all? There's the law enforcement angle. There's the fire bombings. There's the murders. There's the public health crisis because people are smoking more because vapes are illegal and dying as a result.
So there is a human death toll to it. There's obviously the lost tax revenue to the governments. But it's also a problem of a breakdown in social cohesion. And people don't think about this enough because when you turn millions of your citizens into criminals because they're not allowed to use a product that saves their life, what does that do for social fabric?
What does it do to respect for the rule of law, to communities, to all of these sorts of things when millions of your citizens are criminals? So it's a disaster across the board on every single level. And I think this is a profoundly moral question. This isn't just an abstract economic question. It's not just an abstract intellectual question.
It's not just about individual freedoms. Like, yes, that is an important thing. But the social devastation that these policies are causing, where Australia is becoming this sort of gangland, Mad Max-style, failed state when it comes to this. It's really horrific and it breaks my heart to see what has happened to my country.
Brent Stafford 0:03:22
Now, when you listen to yourself there, do you sound overwrought?
Tim Andrews 0:03:28
I mean, It is genuinely emotionally a tragedy for me. Like you look at what is happening and the death toll and the cost and going back to Australia, like it was because I hadn't been for about two years.
And when I went there last year, just hearing, like I was speaking to somebody and went, oh yeah, the shop, A street away from my corner store was being firebombed twice, and it had to go out of business because of the illicit tobacco cartels. Because you have to buy from one, and if you buy from one, the other one firebombs you.
And then you buy from the other, and then the other one firebombs you. And so that's a family-owned business that went out. Just hearing all of these stories from everyone about what is happening to the social fabric of the country, it really is devastating. So how did Australia get there?
I think Australia viewed itself as a leader in tobacco control through instituting the highest taxes in the world. So it's over 50 US dollars for a packet of cigarettes in Australia. It was the first country to bring in plain packaging. It had some of the most restrictive bans and things, and every single one of them failed. Like, the evidence is 100% overwhelmingly true.
I don't think anyone can dispute from the statistics that everything Australia did failed. However...
Once the free market came up with these alternatives, these products people like using, these products that are proven to help smokers quit, because it came from the free market and not from the tobacco control lobby, they are so pathologically invested in their failed prohibitionist, abstinence-only policies, that they couldn't let go of those.
And so they did everything possible for their own psychological gratification, basically, to shut out all of these new products that help smokers quit and just keep doubling down on policies that have failed.
And unfortunately, there's a very, very powerful vested interest and a lot of money behind these failed policies and a lot of very influential people who ignore the science, ignore the evidence, and put their ideology above what is best for people.
Brent Stafford 0:05:49
Aren't some of these people don't they profess science to be something that drives their policy?
Tim Andrews 0:05:58
They profess it very, very loudly, except they then completely ignore it. Like the louder they seem to profess we're following the science, the more they seem to ignore it. Like the proof is in your actions, not in your words. If they say they're pro-science, then they should actually follow the science. They should follow the research and not just ignore it.
And it's very, very clear that they ignore it. They just completely dismiss all of the academic research on the benefits of reduced-risk nicotine products. They ignore all of the evidence about the economic costs. They just dismiss the black market. It is this blinkered vision to just... push a policy of their ideology and just ignore all of the signs.
And I think they just seem to think the louder they can say, signs, signs, signs, the more it gives them cover for the fact that they're actually ignoring it. Tell our audience a bit, Tim, about what you do. Sure, so I'm now at Americans for Tax Reform and the Tholos Foundation in Washington, DC. I did flee Australia.
But we do a lot of, we were founded in the 1980s at the request of President Ronald Reagan to try and advance good policy. And this has been something that we are all quite passionate about at my workplace for the very, very simple reason that it's a fundamental human rights issue.
We are all about returning rights to the individuals and to citizens and to fight back against governments trying to overly regulate behaviour. So this fits very, very neatly into what we do at Americans for Tax Reform. One of our underlying principles is As long as you're not harming everybody else, governments should just leave you alone. So we've been, even before I started.
Brent Stafford 0:07:51
You're from Australia, right? Yes. And what was the programme that you did there? Interestingly enough, we just had... We just had Dr. Joe in, and he mentioned that you were one of the people that ensnarled him. And Colin, Dr. Mendelsohn has been on the show many times. We had Rohan Pike on about two months ago. We had Alex Wodak on again, and Dr.
Carolyn Beaumont, she was on again too. So we've been really covering this Australia thing well. Help us understand what's happening in Australia today and how that reflects back to when you first started in Australia.
Tim Andrews 0:08:36
Australia is a textbook example of what not to do. If you want to use Australia for anything, it's as an example of do the exact opposite because it is a complete policy failure, an absolute disaster about everything.
Brent Stafford 0:08:57
You're from Australia, right? Yes. And what was the programme that you did there? Interestingly enough, we just had We just had Dr. Joe in, and he mentioned that you were one of the people that ensnarled him. And Colin, Dr. Mendelsohn has been on the show many times. We had Rohan Pike on about two months ago. We had Alex Wodak on again, and Dr.
Carolyn Beaumont, she was on again too. So we've been really covering this Australia thing well. Help us understand what's happening in Australia today and how that reflects back to when you first started in Australia.
Tim Andrews 0:09:43
Australia is a textbook example of what not to do. If you want to use Australia for anything, it's as an example of do the exact opposite because it is a complete policy failure, an absolute disaster about everything. textbook learning example of how not to do policy. We've seen statistics that came out yesterday that 80% of the nicotine market in Australia is illegal.
We already know about 97% of the e-cigarette market is illicit. Smoking rates have not just failed to go down, but total nicotine consumption has increased. We've seen over 250 firebombings. We've seen multiple murders because of just how lucrative the drug trade is. I was in Australia recently. Everyone was just using illegal products.
It is so widespread, and this comes with real harms. It's not just that, you know, okay, people are using illicit. What are the harms, first of all? There's the law enforcement angle. There's the fire bombings. There's the murders. There's the public health crisis because people are smoking more because vapes are illegal and dying as a result.
So there is a human death toll to it. There's obviously the lost tax revenue to the governments. But it's also a problem of a breakdown in social cohesion. And people don't think about this enough because when you turn millions of your citizens into criminals because they're not allowed to use a product that saves their life, what does that do for social fabric?
What does it do to respect for the rule of law, to communities, to all of these sorts of things when millions of your citizens are criminals? So it's a disaster across the board on every single level. And I think this is a profoundly moral question. Like this isn't just an abstract economic question. It's not just an abstract intellectual question.
It's not just about individual freedoms. Like, yes, that is an important thing. But the social devastation that these policies are causing, where Australia is becoming this sort of gangland, Mad Max-style, failed state when it comes to this. It's really horrific and it breaks my heart to see what has happened to my country.
Brent Stafford 0:12:14
Now, when you listen to yourself there, do you sound overwrought?
Tim Andrews 0:12:20
I mean, It is genuinely emotionally a tragedy for me. Like you look at what is happening and the death toll and the cost and going back to Australia, like it was, because I hadn't been for about two years.
And when I went there last year, just hearing, like I was speaking to somebody and went, oh yeah, the shop, A street away from my corner store was being firebombed twice, and it had to go out of business because of the illicit tobacco cartels. Because you have to buy from one, and if you buy from one, the other one firebombs you.
And then you buy from the other, and then the other one firebombs you. And so that's a family-owned business that went out. Just hearing all of these stories from everyone about what is happening to the social fabric of the country, it really is devastating. So how did Australia get there?
I think Australia viewed itself as a leader in tobacco control through instituting the highest taxes in the world. So it's over 50 US dollars for a packet of cigarettes in Australia. It was the first country to bring in plain packaging. It had some of the most restrictive bans and things, and every single one of them failed. The evidence is 100% overwhelmingly true.
I don't think anyone can dispute from the statistics that everything Australia did failed.
However, Once the free market came up with these alternatives, these products people like using, these products that are proven to help smokers quit, because it came from the free market and not from the tobacco control lobby, they are so pathologically invested in their failed prohibitionist, abstinence-only policies, that they couldn't let go of those.
And so they did everything possible for their own psychological gratification, basically, to shut out all of these new products that help smokers quit and just keep doubling down on policies that have failed.
And unfortunately, there's a very, very powerful vested and a lot of money behind these failed policies and a lot of very influential people who ignore the science, ignore the evidence, and put their ideology above what is best for people.
Brent Stafford 0:14:41
Aren't some of these people... don't they profess science to be something that drives their policy?
Tim Andrews 0:14:52
They profess it very, very loudly, except they then completely ignore it. Like the louder they seem to profess we're following the science, the more they seem to ignore it. Like the proof is in your actions, not in your words. If they say they're pro-science, then they should actually follow the science. They should follow the research and not just ignore it.
And it's very, very clear that they ignore it. They just completely dismiss all of the academic research on the benefits of reduced-risk nicotine products. They ignore all of the evidence about the economic costs. They just dismiss the black market. It is this blinkered vision to just... push a policy of their ideology and just ignore all of the signs.
And I think they just seem to think the louder they can say, signs, signs, signs, the more it gives them cover for the fact that they're actually ignoring it. Tell our audience a bit, Tim, about what you do. Sure. So I'm now at Americans for Tax Reform and the Thelos Foundation in Washington, DC. I did flee Australia.
But we do a lot of, we were founded in the 1980s at the request of President Ronald Reagan to try and advance good policy. And this has been something that we are all quite passionate about at my workplace for the very, very simple reason that it's a fundamental human rights issue.
We are all about returning rights to the individuals and to citizens and to fight back against governments trying to overly regulate behaviour. So this fits very, very neatly into what we do at Americans for Tax Reform. One of our underlying principles is As long as you're not harming everybody else, governments should just leave you alone.
So we've been, even before I started at ATR, ATR has been very, very focused on this as an important issue. And more recently, we launched together with about a dozen other international partners, including like the Warsaw Enterprise Institute here in Poland, but also groups in Mexico and Australia, throughout Europe. Prohibition does not work.
which is a new international campaign focusing on the negative consequences of prohibition and trying to take a little bit of a different angle from many of the groups here at GFN because many of the groups here do really good work on the individual rights issue, on the science issue, on the public health issue.
But where we saw a gap is not many groups were focusing on the direct costs prohibition to the economy, to society and law enforcement and black markets, et cetera.
And unfortunately, one of the things that I realised when I talked to politicians in the United States is I'll give them the public health arguments, I will give them the science, I will give them all of this as to why if you ban flavours, it will cost lives. There was very little interest in that argument, unfortunately. Like, it's tragic.
It's a sad indictment of our political class that saving lives isn't an argument that moves politicians. But as soon as we started talking to them about lost budget revenues, that's what started getting them interested. And sort of... bowing to reality.
We're focusing very much on those sort of direct economic costs in lost tax revenue, black market, all of those sorts of things with this campaign. And we've done a number of reports now. We've done some case studies on the nicotine pouch ban in Germany, on the Mad Max situation in Australia, on Brazil where they have prohibition, the Netherlands and the failures there.
We've done a lot of polling which shows once you ban products, what happens? People go back to smoking or go to illicit. About 80% of people in the Netherlands, according to some polls we recently did, have said they use either illicit products or they've gone back to smoking as a result. Mexico is another one where we did a case study.
And Mexico is one that It's another clear example where some of the nastiest drug cartels in the country get so much of their revenue from e-cigarettes. Some of your viewers may have seen the videos of the drug cartel that took over that Mexican city a couple of months ago. The entire city was taken over.
burning by drug cartels, the army was expelled, the police were expelled, it was taken over. Horrific footage, I'm not sure, at least in the United States it was front page on CNN and everything, like the lead story. They get a lot of their revenue from illicit vapes now.
Because with taxes being as high as they are, or in some jurisdictions, or with other places where they're illegal, you can make so much money as a result and The costs aren't that much. Like, you get arrested, you get caught, it's a slap on the wrist compared to...
So you can make more money smuggling tobacco products than you can smuggling harder drugs with virtually no cost. With less risk. And there was, in fact, Rohan Pike, I think you mentioned, you had on the show before, made the comment that he was talking to somebody...
a confidential informant in an Australian drug cartel who smuggled these products in and he said, if I bring in 50 illegal shipping containers and the Australian border force capture 49 of them, so they take 49 of the 50 shipping containers, I'll still make a huge profit. That's how lucrative this market is. For e-cigarettes? For e-cigarettes, yeah.
And for conventional tobacco as well. I mean, it was interesting when I was in Australia. Because you have display bans in Australia, so you just have a price list on the shop. And I would go into shops, and I really wish I had the courage to take some photos of this, but I didn't actually want to, you know... Why would, you know, I didn't want a poor shopkeeper.
But you would see the prices, and it would be in Australian dollars. You know, Marlborough, $80. Benson & Hedges, $75. Dunhill, $60, et cetera, in the price list. And then you would see Manchester, $15. Like, Manchester's the illicit brand. Like, you cannot legally buy Manchester. So you would see on the board at, like, every convenience store, like, $80, $75, $60, et cetera.
You're talking about per pack. Per pack, yeah. That's the Australian dollars. So like $80 is about 50 euros or 50 US dollars per pack. So why would you pay that when you've got the illicit one for $15?
Brent Stafford 0:21:32
And when you look at e-cigarettes, for instance, I mean, they're not hard drugs. They aren't, it's not alcohol. This is a product that for all intents and purposes can save your life if you're a smoker, if you make the switch.
Tim Andrews 0:21:45
And you look at products like nicotine pouches, which are illegal in Australia, like nicotine pouches are pharmacologically no different to nicotine gums. Like they are, in some studies actually have fewer contaminants and toxicological comments than nicotine gums. The doctors prescribe, the doctors give you.
And yet because the market came up with that product of nicotine pouches that people liked using, they're banned. It makes no sense. It is like a bizarro clown world in terms of policy in so many countries. And the problem is a lot of it is driven by, I mean, we've had so many presentations at GFN about this before.
You have somebody like Michael Bloomberg who has spent over a billion dollars trying to fight against people saving their lives. There's a lot of money in promoting blatant lies. And again, it comes with a cost. People are dying as a result of this. The invention of e-cigarettes and now nicotine pouches and things is the greatest medical invention since penicillin.
Like, absolutely, if you look at the life-saving potential of these products, can you think of a single thing that could save more lives since penicillin? No, you can't even use polio or... No, because in terms of raw numbers, in terms of raw deaths caused by the consumption of combustible tobacco...
Nothing comes close in raw human cost, which again goes down to why I think this is such a moral issue. Like how dare these people come out and promote policies that lead to death. And somehow people in the media think they're the good guys.
These are the merchants of death, the actual merchants who promote policies that will lead to hundreds of millions of people dying who didn't need to die because they have a warped pathological obsession with prohibition. Is it the control and tobacco control then? Well, yes.
Because the people who used to be involved in tobacco control were rightly pointing out, you know, the problems with tobacco and how it does lead to these sorts of things. But now... that there is a solution. The people who are running these organisations now don't want the solution. They want that abstinence only, their way only.
They have a vested interest in continuing these campaigns to get their funding. I mean, but look, control never really works. If you look at any particular instance when the government tries to prohibit something, it leads to unintended consequences. I mean, prohibition of alcohol in the United States is a classic example. Some good movies that came out of it.
that's maybe one good thing but i mean that was a social disaster you look at the prohibitions now on freedom of speech which has basically led in europe to a resurgence of really vile ideology because by pushing it all underground it can't be refuted it can't be debated um so you're seeing a rise of really nasty stuff there as a direct result of free speech banks in europe You see all of these other cases, wherever governments try and control and ban things, all it leads to is negative policy consequences.
I just think this is probably one of the worst examples of this, just due to how horrific the consequences are.
Brent Stafford 0:25:16
The language coming out of the World Health Organisation's FCTC, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is one where they call for a whole of government and whole of society approach to eradicate nicotine use.
Tim Andrews 0:25:33
Firstly, it needs to be remembered that FCTC is funded entirely by Michael Bloomberg now, almost. It's very unique in WHO in that it is essentially privately funded by somebody with an ideological agenda.
I think the context there is important, that we have somebody who's very clearly stated he has an ideological opposition to these products and he's using his money to use the WHO to promote this. The second thing is that if you look at any WHO Twitter posts on this issue and see all of the community notes they get, they just lie. It's not a difference of opinion.
If WHO was coming out and saying, We need a balanced opinion. These products are safer, but they're not completely safe. Let's have a nuanced approach. I'll disagree with that, but that's a valid opinion. We can debate the science. We can debate all of these sorts of things. Except they just lie. Like, it is blatant lies.
Like, they just make things up that are completely debunked, and it is just blatant lies. And unfortunately, they have the money and the perceived media credibility to be able to do this.
Brent Stafford 0:26:48
Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing. We often use a series of WHO tweets from 2020. during, you know, right at the start of COVID, when you think that the WHO would be concerned about making sure that their reputation for, you know, things that they put out there in the public around public health was, you know, accurate. Instead, it was just...
I mean, it's like you said, it's outright lies.
Tim Andrews 0:27:14
Yeah. Again, if they said, we don't think it's 95% safer, let's discuss... I think it's 95% safer. I think the meta-analysis... that the UK put out pretty accurate. If they disagree with Cochrane on if they're more effective than other quit smoking aids, again, I think Cochrane is the gold standard of medical analysis.
If they want to disagree with that and say, look, maybe it's not five times more effective, that's fine. I would accept that as a legitimate debate. I would disagree with that. I would accept it.
If they want to just lie about a valley, they want to just lie about popcorn lung, if they just want to make up statistics, they want to just, like there was one yesterday where they put out a tweet just making up absolute BS about vaping being possibly more harmful than smoking. Like, there's no basis in reality about this. It is just complete lies.
And it's lies that unfortunately comes with a cost because a lot of people will listen to this. They won't take up I have a friend, a friend of mine, you would think would know better, who took up smoking to quit vaping. The smoker was vaping. because he actually started believing that vaping was worse than smoking. There was a committee hearing I was in.
This was in one of the US states, and there was a teacher who was testifying. She was very, very concerned about vaping, and she caught her daughter with... her 16-year-old daughter with vapes, and she was so concerned about this. But she got her daughter to stop vaping because she started buying cigarettes for her daughter.
This was her testimony at a legislative hearing, and she was proud of this. This was not her saying there's a bad thing. She was saying, I'm really happy I was able to get my daughter to quit vaping by giving her cigarettes.
Brent Stafford 0:29:00
Last year, a tobacco control professional from Public Health in Ontario was doing an interview with the CBC and discussing about how, while it's tragic, he can understand that teenagers would pick up cigarette smoking in order to quit vaping because of the vile things that are inside the e-cigarette. The thing is, nicotine is not a carcinogen.