Australia is Sacrificing Both Health and Mental Health - An Open Letter to Mark Butler

Alan Gor 11 September 2025

Dear Minister Butler,

I’m writing to you not as a lobbyist, not as an academic, not as someone with a political agenda, but as an Australian who has lived the consequences of your policies.

I struggle with mental health. For years, smoking was the only thing that helped me cope. Not because I loved it, but because nicotine offered the only relief I could find. Like so many others in the same position, I wanted to quit, but quitting felt impossible. The methods offered to me, patches, gums, and medications, didn’t work. They didn’t help me breathe easier, they didn’t help me focus, they didn’t help me feel like I could survive the day.

Then I found vaping. For the first time, I could reduce the cigarettes I smoked, breathe easier, and regain some hope that I might actually escape smoking altogether. Vaping wasn’t just a tool to quit; it was a lifeline for my health, my wellbeing, and my mental stability.

And then you banned it.

Now, thanks to your policies, I am left with three terrible options:

• Pay $50 a pack for cigarettes that are slowly killing me.

• Risk the black market, which is thriving because legal, regulated options were removed.

• Walk into a pharmacy and feel criminalised for asking for the one thing that actually helped me survive.

Minister, do you know what that feels like? Do you understand what it does to someone already struggling with mental health, to have their only lifeline ripped away? To be told that ideology matters more than their health, their sanity, and their survival? Your advisors, Simon Chapman, Becky Freeman, PHAA, AMA, Cancer Council, et al, don’t care about people like me.

Meanwhile, across the Tasman, New Zealand is taking a different approach and saving lives. Māori smoking rates have halved. Inequalities are shrinking. People are living longer because their government trusted them with safer options instead of forcing prohibition. They embraced harm reduction, and it worked.

But here in Australia, under your watch, the opposite is happening. Smoking rates are rising. Organised crime is thriving. And people like me are being pushed back to the very thing that kills us all, so you can appear “tough” on vaping.

Minister Butler, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not protecting public health. You are harming it. You are not helping people quit. You are trapping them. And those paying the price are those least able to bear it: people struggling with mental health, people on low incomes, people who already feel left behind by a society that seems to care more about ideology than compassion.

Stop sacrificing people like me to your war on “Big Tobacco.” Stop pretending prohibition works. Start listening to the evidence. Start putting compassion and health above ideology. Because right now, you’re not saving lives, you’re destroying them. And I don’t want to be one of them.

Sincerely,

Alan Gor