A 100 years ago, the US tried to ban alcohol, and the result was a crime wave like never before seen in the USA.

Al Capone shot to fame and fortune, but he was just one of many. And the illegal alcohol trade became big business with violent turf wars and a government response that was as violent as the gangs, leading to shootouts in the streets. Ultimately, the US government became so desperate that they started releasing deliberately poisoned alcohol to scare people away from drinking. Slate reports this sordid chapter of American prohibition history this way: Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. Although mostly forgotten today, the chemist’s war of prohibition remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, “It was our national experiment in extermination.”

10,000 dead, a massive crime wave, and ultimately the prohibition failed.

You would think that this would forever stop any country with a brain from trying to prohibit or overly restrict access to products that people clearly want and will actively seek out whether they are legal or not. But 100 years later, it’s clear that this lesson has not been learned in Australia. Right now, history is very much repeating itself. Not only is the Australian government losing the war on tobacco, but they’re actually killing people with the war on tobacco. You all know the headlines: the wave of violence, the shootings, the fire bombings, the carjackings, etc. Just last week, legal tobacco retailers were warned to stop selling their legal taxed tobacco products for their own safety. This amounts to an admission that the government and law enforcement have 100% completely and absolutely lost the war on illegal tobacco. Ironically, if legal retailers take this advice for their own safety and who can blame them given the frequency of fire bombings and smash-and-grabs that they’re being hit with literally every week then it will cause the legal market to disappear completely. The only tobacco products available in Australia will then be the illegal variety.

Making matters worse and causing untold deaths is the Australian government’s absurd and anti-scientific ban on vapes as a stop-smoking aid. While other developed Western nations like New Zealand and the UK have embraced the benefits of nicotine vapes as a less dangerous alternative to cigarettes, here in Australia, they’ve been banned, pushing many people who were using vapes back to cigarettes and fueling an increase in tobacco consumption in Australia to the great glee of our illegal tobacco organized crime industry. This violent crime wave is entirely the creation of the federal government with Australia’s frankly absurd tobacco taxes. We’ve reached the point where states have no hope of dealing with these very well-funded crime syndicates. The ATO has given up trying to estimate the amount of tobacco excise revenue lost to the illicit tobacco trade. Legal retailers are being intimidated out of the industry altogether.

This is a policy failure like no other in Australian history. We’ve reached the point where we don’t just need to end the war on tobacco and wind back our tobacco taxes; we’ve also reached the point where the architects and supporters of the current policies need to be held to account for their criminal failure.

Before we dive into the details, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy Australians to cut through the crap, make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So if you appreciate what I’m doing here at the Topher project, please help me to keep going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. If you like my videos, you’ll love my books, DVDs, and merch, all of which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. Remember, there are only a few days left before five of my classic merch designs are discontinued forever. Be sure to grab your favorites immediately before stocks run out and these five designs are gone forever.

Let’s start with the warning reported in the Herald Sun that legal tobacco retailers should consider getting out of the tobacco business altogether.

Retailers have been warned the safest thing for their businesses and employees is to take a massive financial hit and totally remove tobacco from their shelves. Rohan Pike, a crime consultant and former Australian Federal Police detective, asked retailers at a conference in Melbourne on Friday morning whether the escalating cost of insurance, constant threat of robberies, falling sales, and the cost of tobacco licenses was worth their substantial investment. It would be difficult to let go of an income source that is underpinning much of your business for many years. But in the current environment, with the health and safety of yourselves and your employees as your priority, destocking tobacco is probably the best preventative measure you could take. In other words, the government and law enforcement have lost the war on tobacco completely.

They’ve lost it so badly that they’ve actually driven an increase in tobacco consumption, according to a report from the ABC. According to studies of wastewater, nicotine consumption in Australia including vaping is at an all-time high. Now, they say including vaping, but thanks to the government’s ban on over-the-counter nicotine vapes, a lot of former vapers have gone back to cigarettes. You can be sure that they’re not paying the full taxed price. The latest figures suggest that half or probably by now more than half of all tobacco products consumed in Australia are now the untaxed illicit variety (from the ABC again). A study published by FTI Consulting put it at 39.4% in 2024, up from 14% six years ago. But an update for the month of June puts the figure at 50%.

It’s a $10 billion industry and growing fast. Who says you can’t make money in Australia these days? Where this gets really dark is when you add the soft-on-crime approach that our state governments most notably Victoria, but others as well have towards underage criminal offenders. These organized crime syndicates are recruiting teenagers to do their dirty work, knowing that even if they get caught, they’re going to be bailed within hours anyway. Many of the cars being stolen right now are being stolen for the purpose of being used in tobacco-war-related violent crimes, including shootings, smash-and-grabs, and more. The crime syndicates are training kids to steal cars, commit fire bombings, or even participate in shootings in what can only be regarded as an apprenticeship into organized crime.

The crazy part is that governments around Australia are still not admitting that they caused all of this. In the federal government’s case, their insane tobacco taxes are responsible $2,391.31 per kilogram for loose tobacco and cigars, or nearly $1.50 per cigarette. No wonder smash-and-grabs are so lucrative. That cupboard full of cigarettes in every corner store is worth tens of thousands of dollars just in tax value. No wonder people are looking for the illegal untaxed option in such large numbers that the government’s tax revenue from cigarettes has dropped to its lowest level in nearly a decade, wiping $6.5 billion off their tax take compared to just five years ago.

The worst part is that not only are state and federal governments not willing to face the fact that they’ve lost the war on tobacco,

but they are determined to double down on their failure. From Tasmania to New South Wales, Victoria, and frankly everywhere in Australia, what we’re seeing from the governments are promises of crackdowns. Going back to the Herald Sun article, a Victorian government spokesperson said the government was implementing tough laws to smoke out the illegal tobacco trade. Tobacco Licensing Victoria continues to assess license applications ahead of the 1st of February, 2026 deadline when all licensed businesses will appear on a public register, and businesses caught selling illicit tobacco can face fines of up to $1.8 million or jail time. According to the Victorian government, licensing is the answer to the illegal tobacco industry. Can they hear themselves?

There was a sliver of sanity, though, which came from Victorian shadow police minister David Southwick. To suggest that it is safer to actually not sell tobacco in a regulated manner than to do it and threaten your lives is surrendering to the crooks and the gangs. This is what these governments have allowed to happen, state and federal. He urged a crackdown on organized crime activity, telling the audience that crime does pay and called for the government to follow the money. These kids are sent out to commit crimes. He’s right, but he’s also wrong to suggest that a crackdown is the answer. The answer is for the Australian federal government to admit defeat and abolish these insane tobacco taxes, which created this black market in the first place.

Prohibition fails always. We’ve known this for a hundred years, and we’re not special here in Australia.

If we make the same mistakes, we will get the same results. Whilst I don’t expect the federal government to start releasing poisoned cigarettes anytime soon, following in the footsteps of the US government who released poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, the fact is that today’s tobacco taxes are most certainly killing people specifically, the people who had successfully quit smoking cigarettes by using the less harmful option of nicotine vapes. Those people have now been driven back to cigarettes due to the government ban on vaping. I believe that the failure of the war on tobacco is the single most spectacular and counterproductive policy failure in Australia today. It is long past the point where we need to wind it back. But it’s also at the point where the politicians and bureaucrats who supported it need to face some consequences because the Australian people whether we’re smokers or not are all paying the price in the form of this crime wave: the carjackings, the home invasions, the fire bombings, the shootings in our streets, sometimes in broad daylight, not to mention the amount of law enforcement resources which are now being diverted away from other crimes and other needs by this war on untaxed tobacco.

We need to see state and federal opposition parties make ending the tobacco war a priority a policy platform that they stand on proudly because the current tobacco taxes are costing us all. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. If you appreciate having a voice of reason in a world gone mad, please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. If you like my videos, you’ll love my books, DVDs, and merch, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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