Groupthink Is Killing Tobacco Harm Reduction in Australia

By Pippa Starr

14 November 2025

What if you saw something so absurd, so obviously wrong, that it defied both common sense and science, but everyone around you nodded in agreement?

Would you speak up and risk ridicule, or would you stay silent and conform?

That’s exactly where Australia stands today on tobacco harm reduction.

Once, we were proud of our evidence-based public health. Now, our government has shackled itself to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), a once-well-intentioned treaty that has calcified into dogma.

While countries such as the UK, Sweden, and New Zealand have embraced vaping and nicotine alternatives to drive smoking rates to historic lows, Australia has chosen prohibition, red tape, and police raids.

Our leaders call this “world-leading. ”But world-leading in what? Certainly not in outcomes. Smoking prevalence in Australia has barely shifted in recent years, while illicit tobacco and black-market vapes explode across the country. Organized crime is thriving. Public trust is collapsing. Adults are criminalized for quitting cigarettes the wrong way.

And yet the official narrative repeats: “We are protecting public health.”

In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch showed how easily people could be pressured into denying what they plainly saw, agreeing with the group even when the group was wrong. Today’s health bureaucracy is trapped in its own Asch experiment. Officials see the data from the UK’s Royal College of Physicians, Public Health England, and Sweden’s near-smokeless success, yet they continue to insist that vaping is just as bad as smoking. Why? Because to admit otherwise would mean admitting they were wrong.

It’s groupthink in its purest form: consensus at any cost, dissent suppressed, alternatives dismissed. In this atmosphere, truth becomes secondary to institutional comfort. The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but no one dares say so.

At the global level, the WHO has become the high priest of this orthodoxy. The FCTC’s Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings have devolved into echo chambers where any voice supporting harm reduction is treated as heresy. No journalists. No consumers. No transparency. Just bureaucrats congratulating each other on fighting “Big Tobacco”, even if it means fighting the very tools that could end smoking.

The result? Countries like Australia obediently adopt prohibitive policies that hand the nicotine market to criminal networks instead of regulated retailers. The war on vaping has replaced the war on smoking, but the casualties, in lives, livelihoods, and liberty, remain tragically real.

Every time an Australian adult is denied access to a safer nicotine product, every time a small business is raided while violent gangs profit, every time a smoker is told “quit or die,” the silence grows louder.

Our scientists who speak up, and there are many brave ones, are side lined. Our journalists largely echo government talking points. Even public-health NGOs, once champions of evidence, now act as moral police, enforcing ideological purity rather than public wellbeing.

But history reminds us: truth-telling always starts with the few willing to risk being mocked. The boy who said the emperor was naked. The jester who could speak truth to the king. The citizen who refuses to conform to a lie.

Breaking the groupthink begins with courage, and curiosity. Ask questions. Follow the evidence. Read the science from independent sources, not press releases. Support consumer-led harm-reduction movements like ALIVE Advocacy, which fight for adult rights, evidence-based regulation, and open debate.

Talk to your doctor about harm reduction. Write to your MP. Challenge misinformation when you see it shared online. Refuse to accept the false choice between smoking and abstinence.

Australia doesn’t need to remain an outlier. It can re-join the scientific world, one that values evidence over ideology, compassion over control, and freedom over fear.

The truth is simple :Nicotine isn’t the killer. Smoke is, and every adult who switches from cigarettes to a regulated vape or nicotine pouch is a victory for health, not a threat to it.

So let’s stop pretending the emperor’s robes are fine silk when they’re really just smoke and mirrors. It’s time to restore reason, science, and honesty to Australia’s tobacco policy, before groupthink claims even more lives.