– The break down.
by Pippa Starr November 18, 2024
Last night, 60 Minutes ran a story that involved bad actors to instil more moral panic and more Government propaganda to fool the average non smoking/non vaping Australian into thinking vaping is a ploy by Big Tobacco to try and hook a whole new generation into a life of nicotine.
What most Australians really don’t understand is nicotine is not the devil that it was once thought to be. The harms come from smoking combustible cigarettes, where the tar and the smoke cause 2/3 of long term smokers to a premature death, not the nicotine.
Nicotine levels in vapes without the combustion are relatively benign.
We have been taught for decades that nicotine is the devil, yet it’s ok and legal in Australia to sell berry flavoured nicotine containing products such as spray inhalers and gums in supermarkets from age 12.
While I don’t recommend youths start vaping, it’s important to consider why they are, how prevalent it really is, and why youths are able to access adult vaping products easily.
The 60 minutes journos appear to have done no research to understand this.
Vaping began as safer than smoking alternative and it wasn’t by big pharma or big tobacco, it wasn’t in their business models!
It was independent inventor, Hon Lik in 2003 that brought vaping into the world as we know it. Big Tobacco only got on board much later as they realised they were losing market share to a rapidly growing vape industry.
The story on 60 Minutes last night featured a plant paid for and trained by Cancer Council Victoria/ Quit Victoria with your taxes.
Her name is Lilly Ford, an aspiring Instagram influencer. The viewers are fooled into believing this is some sort random well spoken inspiring young lady who is changing the world, and in a way she is, but it’s a façade that has a history now.
It is alleged that Lilly Ford 22, answered an ad put out by Quit Victoria that asked young people to share quit vaping stories.
A young Lilly saw this as an opportunity to grow her Instagram following “wellbeingwithlilly”, as many young people do. She has appeared in a video with Quit Victoria, on Q&A & A Current Affair earlier this year, as well as being featured in several other news articles as a poster child for vaping.
Featured in the Newspapers Here: https://news.com.au/lifestyle/health/from-daily-vaping-to-half-marathons-how-lily-ford-overcame-her-vaping-addiction/news-story/988daf9519de1a3fc8ffde9146ae0f5d…
On SBS here: https://sbs.com.au/news/insight/article/my-vape-addiction-crept-up-slowly-to-quit-i-had-to-find-a-new-habit/km31ukvwf…
Essentially, she is a Government funded plant in last nights story.
As I get further into this breakdown, you will learn that there is a lot of things she says that just don’t add up!
Lilly ford joins Eric Bagshaw in the intro of this story walking down the street with her arms behind like an English bobby posturing as if she is an expert in this subject.
From the introduction of this puff piece, lead journalist Eric Bagshaw claims we have been sucked in by vaping, claiming it is a deceitful ploy by big tobacco to hook a whole new generation to vaping.
He went on to claim Big Tobacco bosses went on to promote vaping, of course they did, they were losing market share to a much safer competitor and wanted in!
However they are not dominant in this space yet. Historically, Big Tobacco have had very little to no market share of vapes sold in Australia.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have no reason to defend big tobacco, they killed my dearest grandmother! But misdirecting people is of no help here. Big Tobacco made an appearance with their vapes in chemists this year and their dominant brand the “veev” has been a big sales failure in Australia as only 0.23% of all Australian vapers actually buy their vapes from chemists.
From the outset of this story it doesn’t suggest that the government has failed to apply reasonable risk proportionate regulations to vaping products, which in turn has caused a thriving black market to flourish selling vapes directly from Chinese manufacturers, oh no it’s Big Tobacco!
Is it? Big tobacco companies are understandably one of the most watched and monitored companies by Australia, yet not one charge has been alleged against a big tobacco company for selling vapes in Australia. Not one! That’s because the vaping black market is controlled by serious international organised crime syndicates, that use the funding they make from illicit vapes and tobacco to fund the worst crimes imaginable!
That’s around 5 Billion dollars a year taken from our economy tax free with no consequences!
25 Billion dollars since 2019, to fund sex traffickers and much worse!
Is it any wonder why rival crime gangs are fighting a turf war that is firebombing every day Australian small businesses no less than 148 times since March last year?
These often overseas based criminals even pay our local teens as young as 14 to do their dirty work like firebombing for them.
Yet 60 Minutes have missed these facts.
They highlighted the failure of government policy exhibiting the fact that since disposable vapes were banned from being imported on January 1 this year, that 4.5 million vapes were ceased by ABF.
I’ve followed this issue for years and understand the resources that the ABF have, and it is not unfair to suggest that they would be lucky to capture up to 10% of all illicit products coming into Australia! While the attention is on vapes, heroin, cocaine, ice, other hard drugs and teen alcohol abuse that claims hundred of lives each year are seemingly less worthy of moral panic?
Vapes don’t claim lives, they save them from the perils of smoking when regulated sensibly! Erik Bragshaw goes onto mention multimillion dollar fines for selling vapes in Australia and highlights how retailers of black market vapes appear to not really care.
That’s because the Australian Govt and state governments simply don’t have the resources to enforce such penalties. Sure, there may be the odd bust here and there to film or take a picture for the media to appear as if there is some level of enforcement, but the fact is, it’s a drop in the ocean!
The black market supply well over 50% of all nicotine based products in Australia now and it’s uncontrollable! It’s a giant game of unwinnable wack-A-mole that even a massive military operation would struggle to contain.
Essentially, trying to enforce the illicit nicotine market has two chances of success, bugger all and none! It’s a massive cost burden on taxpayers now costing billions of dollars a year!
There are only 2 inconvenient levers the government can pull now to curb the nicotine black market, reducing tax on tobacco and legalising vapes to be sold sensibly in over 18 retail settings.
Australian health minister Mark Butler who has led this ridiculous overstep on current nicotine product policy, egged on by tax leeching NGO’s claimed that he is seeing vape stores close right around the country.
Let’s fact check this.
Previously legal vape specialist stores that sold non nicotine containing vapes have closed down. They didn’t sell all the disposable-coloured cheap Chinese rubbish that the black market sells! They were good small businesses that kept teens out of shops and only helped Adults!
They complied with laws and closed down because they were forced to by law, putting thousands out of work in a cost-of-living crisis. These store locations have now often been replaced by black market operators after the previously legal vape specialist stores lost everything with no government compensation!
So, when Butler was asked are the laws on vaping actually working, it’s obviously a clear no in reality.
Let’s go back to Lilly Ford, she told 60 minutes she began vaping 7 years ago when she was 15 years old, but told told the SBS in June this year, “By the age of 18, nearly a year after I started smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, I was vaping every day. I was late to the trend compared to my peers, many who'd started smoking reusable e-cigarettes at 16 or 17.” Lilly Ford is now age 22, and if she began vaping 7 years ago as she claims, she would have been an outlier rather than in with here peers.
Vaping really didn’t gain much traction among youths until around the last 2-3 years. Yet she claimed on 60 minutes last night that she first vaped a “Juul” branded device, which was and still is about as common in Australia as rocking horse poop.
She described the process of putting in the pods in a Juul device, but the story just doesn’t pass the BS test.
Disposable vapes really didn’t have much of a presence in Australia till around 4 years ago, only to become far more prominent in the last 2-3 years. There is no footage at all of Lilly vaping a Juul. Pictures of her vaping appear to be when she was much older than 15. She claimed that she knew smoking was dangerous by all the tobacco pack warnings yet claims she smoked rollies.
The 60 minutes story features Quit, who are essentially a taxpayer funded arm of the cancer council who don’t appear to have any KPI’s attributed. The last known figure was around 5 years ago where their engagement of Australian smokers was abysmal. They went from 1.8% to just 0.9% of engagement. They don’t appear to release any accountability figures for the tens of millions of dollars that they are paid to help smokers quit.
As for success rates who knows?
But they are successful in receiving several anti competing multimillion dollar grants from taxpayers. Yet the current head of Quit blames the rise of vaping on the back of big tobacco companies! Wait what? How?
Govt policy fails to sensibly regulate vaping, a black market sees an unenforceable opportunity to make huge money selling vapes to anyone and yet they point the finger at big tobacco like a child blames another when they are getting in trouble?
If only it was easy to blame big tobacco and charge them with the crimes being alleged here as if it is certain truth, because it would be a lot easier! But again, no big tobacco company is being charged for bringing in vapes that hook another generation!
Australia fought big tobacco and won against big tobacco when they pushed back against plain packaging, so why don’t the Australian Govt and Quit start legal action, or haven’t bothered over the last few years this has been a problem? Why?
Because they are misdirecting you the punter!
It’s an easy finger point, rather than admit failure!
Notice how there were no real adult vaping consumers interviewed on 60 minutes last night? Why was that?
Around 96% of all vapers in Australia are Adults, NOT YOUTHS.
Yet adult vapers are told to go to a chemist and in some states with a prescription to get vapes, only one problem, less than 1 in 10 chemists stock them and the chemists don’t want them as pointed out by a chemist on the segment.
So where do Australian vapers go now their previously legal vape shops have been shut down and chemists don’t want them? Yes, that’s right. The black market! Essentially our government is refusing to admit failure, points the finger elsewhere while they stuff the pockets of NGOs and organise propaganda hits like the one seen last night on 60 minutes!
Mark Butler can sit there and tell lies about how vaping was presented by big tobacco,
but if you haven’t skipped through this you will know that is a blatant finger pointing lie to cover his failures.
He claims there are rainbow unicorn vapes, yet in 8 years I have never been able to find one. He barely acknowledges the families, residents, businesses, kindergartens, education spaces and community hubs that have been rocked by Tobacco and vape turf wars!
Why is that?
People have been lucky to survive, especially 2 young children who had suffered smoke inhalation in their beds just a few weeks ago!
Because the public have been hoodwinked by Butler and his favourite NGOs who make millions out of this debacle to pay bad actors like their influencer plant Lilly who makes outrageous claims that simply don’t add up! The whole issue is a failure and a massive farce!
