When ciggies are an illicit drug
Tuesday, July 10, 2025.
Cigarettes manufactured for legal sale in Japan, but sold illegally in Sydney.
Traditionally, tobacco smokers have not been considered people who use drugs because the word ‘drugs’ is understood to mean illicit drugs. But what makes a drug illicit is not determined by the nature of the drug, but by the law.
Although tobacco is not being criminalised, high taxes which already make legal cigarettes in Australia the most expensive in the world are being hiked yet again on July 1. Moreover, it will only be legal to sell packs of 20 cigarettes or 30 grams of rollie tobacco.
This heavy taxation is supposed to be a harm reduction measure by discouraging use. But as legal nicotine becomes unaffordable, an increasing proportion of nicotine consumed becomes illicit, boosting the already booming black market. Illegally imported cigarettes, counterfeit cigarettes, “chop-chop” (illegal loose tobacco) and illegal nicotine vapes are rapidly surpassing legal products in Australia.
You can even notice this if you look at litter in urban streets — these days you hardly ever see Australian cigarette packets with their distinctive drab olive plain packaging and scary pictures. Multiple brands in colourful packaging are back.
Until very recently, the governmental response has been to maintain the belief that tobacco should keep becoming more expensive until everybody stops smoking. Large amounts of money have gone to policing and border security in the hopes that this will make illicit tobacco products and vapes disappear. However, the money to police the illicit products is supposed to come from the taxes from legal cigarettes and tobacco. Since 2019 there have been shortfalls in tobacco tax revenue as fewer and fewer people buy legal cigarettes.
On June 2, NSW Premier Chris Minns strayed from convention and questioned whether tobacco taxes could keep rising indefinitely.
“We need to have a look at how big this excise [tax] is, how it’s driving illegal tobacco sales in our community,” he said to the ABC.
“And is it the best use of NSW Police time to be devoted to tobacco sales, when in the end the federal government’s not getting the excise that they thought — they’re not getting that tax that they would get from that massive increase.”
At a June 3 press conference he elaborated: “This is another element of federal policy we believe needs to change. This will be the only tax in the history of the world that has doubled and revenue has declined by 33 per cent. Where is all that money going … into the illegal tobacco sector.”
However, the federal government remains committed to the current policy. “Tobacco excise is an important public health measure to encourage people to give up smoking,” federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the ABC on June 2.
“We are working with NSW and the other states and territories when it comes to the enforcement challenge with illegal tobacco.”
Existing consensus
Chalmers’ quick dismissal of the suggestion reflects that Minns is breaking from a firmly established consensus shared by Labor, the Coalition and the Greens, with the only dissenting voices being the occasional Coalition backbencher and some of the far-right crossbenchers. This consensus has been shared by most of the media reporting, some academics and lobby groups such as the Cancer Council.
The consensus began in the late 20th Century as a much-needed correction to decades of policy makers ignoring or minimising the health dangers from tobacco, encouraged by a powerful tobacco lobby. It became entrenched as a result of Australia being very successful in reducing the smoking rate — the percentage of Australians who smoke or vape nicotine daily has fallen to about 12% from 24% in 1991, and the taxation-fuelled price hikes have definitely played a role. Politicians are understandably proud of Australia’s world leading figures in smoking reduction. However, it is simplistic to attribute the falling smoking rate solely to the rising price.
Australia introduced the world’s first health warnings on tobacco packets in 1973. However, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that smoking reduction policies became serious. Until 1987 it was legal to smoke on NSW trains. Since then, smoking has been banned from almost all indoor public spaces and increasingly outdoors: at bus stops, near the entrance of pubs, and so on. Advertising tobacco products has been banned and public health campaigns with anti-smoking messages have been common for decades.
A closer look at the figures shows that continually rising prices do not automatically lead to continually falling smoking rates. In fact, smoking rates fell steadily from the late 1980s until about 2013, but since then the proportion of Australians smoking or vaping has remained steady at about 12%. While prices have steadily increased throughout this period, it has only been since 2011 that the policy of locked-in price rises has sent the price skyrocketing. Yet for most of that time the nicotine consumption rate has stopped falling.
Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) via The Guardian.
The exponential price rises started at the same time that plain packaging was introduced, and it is impossible to determine which contributed more to the decline in smoking rates between then and 2013. What is not in doubt is that since 2013 the invention of nicotine vapes is the only thing that has affected the smoking rate by introducing a different method of nicotine consumption.
The policy of continued increases in the tax, and therefore the price of tobacco, is the belief that nicotine consumption will be eradicated completely if it becomes too expensive. This belief is also the reason that unlike in Britain, in Australia vaping is not officially recognised as a potentially safer alternative to smoking but has also been the subject of ineffective criminalisation.
Becky Freeman from the University of Sydney, who is a regularly quoted expert, sums up the official approach: “We don’t want people smoking at all, be that taxed cigarettes or illicit tobacco. To protect both your health – and your bank balance – not smoking has to be the focus.”
The spectacular rise in illegal nicotine product consumption, the resulting loss of government revenue (about $7 billion in this years budget), and the rise in violence that inevitably comes with a significant amount of commerce being under the control of criminal enterprises, has led to an increase in media articles questioning the current approach. Some of these articles point to the USA’s notoriously unsuccessful experiment in alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.
One only needs to look at drugs that are currently illegal to see the impossibility of Freeman’s goal of nobody smoking at all. In the attempt at stopping consumption of drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, billions of dollars have been spent on law enforcement, prisons have been filled, and the death penalty has been used — the “war on drugs” is not just a metaphor: countries have been invaded and vast areas of land have been sprayed with plant-killing chemicals. Yet people still consume heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.
The black-market cigarette scene
Illegal tobacco products have always existed in Australia. However, until relatively recently the market was mainly smokers with less money to spend (such as the unemployed, pensioners, students or casual workers) or with a preference for specific foreign brands or types of cigarettes (e.g. clove kreteks). While the decline in the number smokers has been greater among the more wealthy, meaning the proportion of smokers who are relatively poor has increased, illegal products are now becoming the norm for smokers across the socio-economic spectrum.
As Premier Minns pointed out: “They wouldn’t break the law in a million years, but they’re being dragged into a black market where they go to the store, they can either buy a $17 or $20 packet of illegal cigarettes, or a $60 packet of cigarettes.”
One of the more visible results of the illegal tobacco boom is the rapidly increasing number of tobacconists throughout the country. Illegal cigarettes are also widely available in corner shops and groceries. What is available can vary greatly in quality. Illegal disposable nicotine vapes are also widely available — prices rose briefly (and availability fell) after last year’s anti-vaping laws were introduced, but then returned to what they were before.
Besides vapes, the most common products are counterfeit cigarettes, smuggled cigarettes and chop-chop.
Counterfeit and smuggled cigarettes
Some cigarettes that are illegally sold in Australia were legally produced to be sold elsewhere. The huge difference between the price of cigarettes in Australia and almost everywhere else in the world means that large profits can be made by diverting legal cigarettes from other countries to Australia. For example, a packet of 20 Marlboros intended for sale in Japan can be sold in Australia for 4 times the Japanese price while still being only half the price of a legal packet in Australia.
From the point of view of most smokers, smuggled cigarettes, which generally cost between $20 and $30, are preferable to the alternative: counterfeit cigarettes, which generally cost between $6 and $15. A Marlboro from a Japanese packet tastes the same as one an Australian plain packaged Marlboro that costs twice the price. A counterfeit Marlboro tastes like lawnmower clippings.
Counterfeits are much more easily obtained than illegally imported cigarettes, apart from Double Happiness and Manchester, both of which can be found everywhere.
From a harm reduction point of view, there are wildly conflicting reports about whether counterfeits have additional harmful ingredients, and there is no reliable data. But the fact that their manufacture is totally unregulated increases the possibility. Some smokers report feeling physically ill after smoking counterfeits, but this could be a psychosomatic response to their unpleasant taste and dubious origin. Other smokers regularly smoke counterfeits by choice. Smuggled cigarettes that can be legally sold overseas will be as safe as legitimately purchased cigarettes.
Knowing what’s counterfeit and what isn’t can be difficult. It’s often possible to recognise a packet that is definitely counterfeit: health warnings and consumer information (such as addresses and phone numbers of local manufacturers and distributors) can be missing, or they’ll be incongruities such as an address or phone number from one country and a health warning from a different country. Counterfeit packaging can also look identical to that of the legitimate product, so it’s never possible to say that a packet is definitely not counterfeit.
Australia’s most popular brands
After plain packaging was introduced along with massive price hikes, brand preference changed in Australia. More expensive iconic brands (lacking their iconic packaging) were abandoned in favour of whatever was cheapest. However, as smokers are abandoning expensive plain packaged cigarettes for cheaper illegal alternatives, brand preferences are back, and 2 brands are becoming increasingly popular: Double Happiness and Manchester.
Double Happiness is from China, where it has long been a prestige brand. It has been available in Australia for several decades. In the past its market was mainly Chinese migrants but in recent years it has become popular among smokers from all backgrounds because it is cheaper than other smuggled brands, retailing for as little as $10 a packet.
Manchester cigarettes fall in a grey zone between being counterfeit and illegally smuggled. They are legally manufactured in Dubai but, as United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime research expert Ted Leggett told the ABC: “The thing about Manchester is that it is not clearly packaged for legal sale almost anywhere in the world.”
They are legally produced for illegal sale, in other words.
Furthermore, counterfeit Manchester cigarettes are also imported from South-East Asia and it is impossible to tell them apart from the packaging. They can sometimes be distinguished by price and always distinguished by taste. While legally produced Manchester cigarettes from Dubai are not high quality, the illegally produced South-East Asian copies have the distinctive lawn mower clippings flavour of counterfeit cigarettes.
The cost of Manchesters varies widely. Within walking distance of where I live they are available at different shops for $7, $10, $14, $16 and $20. In one local shop (my personal favourite) they have identical packets of Manchester for either $7 or $10. The $10 ones are the real thing from Dubai, the $7 ones are South-East Asian copies. If you are a smoker the price difference is $3 well spent!
Chop-chop and rollie tobacco
Chop-chop is something of an Australian tradition, although as with smuggled cigarettes, its market until recently was mainly people with low spending power. Much urban mythology exists about its origins, but most is illegally grown in Australia. Some might be imported or diverted from legal supply chains. Even before legal tobacco became ridiculously expensive in Australia, chop-chop was ridiculously cheap.
Chop-chop is notorious for being of variable, and sometimes really bad, quality. Sometimes sold by the kilo in shopping bags, it can be excessively dry or so damp that it needs to be dried in an oven. Sometimes it is mouldy. Like with counterfeit cigarettes, there is no data concerning harmful additives to chop-chop, but because of the way it is produced, pesticide contamination is a possible risk.
Often sold in sandwich bags, 50 grams of chop-chop can cost as little as $10.
Unlike with cigarettes, legally produced but illegally imported rollie tobacco is very hard to find. Where it is available, it costs significantly more than chop-chop but significantly less than legal tobacco. Furthermore, better quality chop-chop is often sold in pouches under the pretence that it is legally produced but illegally imported.
Rollie tobacco is still bought legally by a lot of smokers, as it has always been cheaper than tailor-made cigarettes. However, the price changes coming on July 1, together with the banning of sale of anything other than 30g pouches, means that affordable 15g pouches (currently as cheap as $40) will no longer be legal, and the cheapest legal pouch will cost at least $100.
Better approaches
Tobacco is harmful. There is no safe way to smoke. In Britain, among other places, it is recognised that vaping is safer than smoking. However, because most vapes in Australia are illicit, there are risks of product contamination.
Similarly, counterfeit cigarettes and chop-chop have a risk of product contamination, particularly pesticides in the case of chop-chop.
Government policy could aid harm reduction by:
• Following Britain’s example of allowing vapes to be used without all the restrictions that in Australia make illegal disposable vapes the only easy and cheap way of getting them; and
• Taking Chris Minns’ advice and abandoning the dogmatic strategy of seeking to eliminate tobacco use through price hikes.