Australia: Black Market Vape Sales Outpace Legal Products 1,700 to 1

Australia’s legal vape market has been destroyed by the government mandate that forced sales into pharmacies, and replaced by an illicit market at least partially controlled by organized crime.

Now the scale of the failure has become clearer after government documents obtained by a newspaper under the Australian Freedom of Information Act show that legal sales account for only about one of every 1,700 transactions.

Illicit sellers dominate the Australian vape market

The Daily Telegraph obtained pharmacy sales records recently from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the country’s drug regulator. The paper reported this week that pharmacists reported fewer than 6,000 supply notifications per month from October 2024 to April 2025. 

According to the newspaper, the TGA admits that over 10 million vapes are sold each month on the illicit market. Illegal products—mostly typical Chinese disposable vapes—are sold in ordinary retail stores, including smoke shops and convenience stores.  Legal products in pharmacies are available in tobacco, menthol and mint flavors only, and must be sold in plain packaging. 

Australia adopted the scheme last year after a bill that would have banned all sales without a doctor’s prescription fell through. The compromise legislation, passed in June 2024 and in effect since October, allows consumers to purchase vapes without a prescription, but only from licensed pharmacies.

However, pharmacies were not consulted before the legislation was pushed through, and most are clearly not interested in being vape retailers. The Daily Telegraph says no more than 700 of Australia’s 5,900 pharmacies are selling non-prescription vaping products—and even that number may be high because of glitches in the TGA’s tracking system.

On average, each legal seller is reporting only one sale every 2-3 days, while over 300,000 vapes are sold daily on the black market. 

Australian vape bans: failing since 2008

Australia banned the sale of nicotine-containing vaping products without a prescription in 2008, when the TGA classified nicotine as a poison, except when contained in “tobacco prepared and packed for smoking.” But until last year, the government tacitly allowed consumers to import nicotine on their own, and many vapers mixed their own e-liquid, or bought pre-mixed short fills from vape shops. 

Vape shops were allowed to sell zero-nicotine vape juice and refillable vape devices, even during the earlier 2021 prescription-only scheme adopted by the previous Liberal/coalition government. But even as that plan was rolling out, cheap disposable vapes had begun flooding the country (and the world), and made vaping with nicotine easily accessible to everyone.

The widespread sale of disposable vapes helped launch an intensified vaping moral panic, which newly minted Labor Party Health Minister Greg Hunt used as a pretext to promote his new prescription-only scheme, which included assurances of increased and effective port enforcement and new penalties for violators.

Even when he was forced to back down from the prescription-only scheme and allow pharmacy sales without prescriptions, Hunt insisted the plan would eliminate the black market.

“Our world-leading laws will return vapes and e-cigarettes to what they were originally sold to the Australian community and to governments around the world as: therapeutic products to help hardened smokers kick the habit,” Butler told the Guardian Australia last June. “From Monday next week, it will be unlawful to supply, manufacture, import, and sell a vape outside of a pharmacy setting.”

Since then, Hunt’s “world-leading” vape restrictions—combined with Australia’s astonishingly high cigarette tax—have wiped out the legal vaping sector, expanded the already-huge black market, led to declining tobacco tax revenues, and encouraged organized crime participation in the vape market. 

Disputes among gangs seeking control of illegal vape and tobacco sales have led to a wave of “tobacco war” violence, including extortion, kidnapping and numerous firebombings of stores. 

The obvious solution to the vape portion of the country’s tobacco wars is to legalize and regulate vapes as consumer products, and make legal products widely available. But until the government admits there is a problem and acknowledges that its bizarre pharmacy scheme doesn’t work, that can’t happen.