Posted: 2025-12-23

Cleaner Vices Can Be Worse

The Vape Ban

The Federal ban on nicotine vaporisers has not been well-regarded by the public as successful.

The prohibition's logic revolved around vapes being dangerous. It is not broadly controversial that as long as you use reputable juice, they have a vastly lower overall rate of cancer or lung disease than traditional tobacco products, and many think that the government's financial reliance on the tobacco sin tax immediately lays bare the official story's deception. Let's dig a little deeper.

I have a side story to share, before continuing.

Tert-Butyl Alcohol

Here's an interesting piece of niche pharmacology which might help illustrate the point.

Tert-butyl alcohol is far more potent by weight than ethanol, and even small amounts can cause similar effects without the risk of hangover or liver damage. It is absolutely not harmless, and overdose can be particularly lethal. With that being said, similar to vapes, it is a "cleaner" version of a well known vice. But even when used moderately, the cleanliness ironically makes it more dangerous.

How many times have you staggered to the bathroom in the wee hours of a Sunday morning and vowed to never drink again?

The absence of hangovers, stomach irritation or liver damage means that there is nothing stopping a tert-butyl user from escalating doses again and again. Because its tolerance mechanism works fairly similarly to ethanol, this means rapidly stepping down from a very high dose can be quite dangerous.

The Trouble With Vapes

Back to vapes. The "cleanliness" of vapes is not likely to directly lead to a medical crisis, but it creates a bunch of new behavioural problems that cigarettes don't have: taking a puff of a vape doesn't require commitment to finish a whole cigarette, and it won't cover you and your surroundings in smoke and tar, so it is much more usable indoors or on the sly. You can simply take a puff here and a puff there on-demand.

This is a particularly problematic combination for a drug that is only marginally intoxicating but has powerful impacts on motivation and memory. It can become very easy for dosages and frequency of use to creep up unnoticed — everyone knows what "a pack a day smoker" is, but tracking how much you're using your vape might not always be so simple. "Grab this, suck in" is such a more streamlined experience that it can happen with the user barely thinking about it.

What Should Have Happened

Vapes are a thing. This has been the case for some time. There is no possible form of legislation which is ever going to change that fact.

Vapes should have been regulated shortly after they became available.

I always remember, when I was in high school, a poster outside the nurse's office pointing out all of the poisons that were in cigarette smoke and what the effects of each were. I always marvelled at the notion that in such a tightly regulated and controlled market, the government could not simply adjust the contents of cigarettes so that these poisons weren't present.

Of course the real world is more complex than I could have grasped at the time, but when it comes to vapes we can literally do exactly that.

If vapes had been regulated, control over the formulations and how much and how often the vaporisers dispensed nicotine would have become possible. By making regulated and safe sources of clean nicotine readily and cheaply available, we could have actually had the best of both worlds — reducing cancer and cardiovascular disease (also "popcorn lung") while allowing people who wanted to quit to simply press a button and have their active dosage silently and automatically drop off over many months. There would not need to be a centrally controlled database, just some straightforward forms of automation that are already well understood.

The calculus of what should have happened is straightforward. The calculus of why it didn't is equally simple.

Across 2019-2020, the government received $16 billion in tobacco excise [1]. I'm not saying that our politicians are beholden to the tobacco industry but that's sixteen billion very good reasons to have their ear.

Since then, the endlessly increasing (and currently quite extreme) cost of legal tobacco has unsurprisingly resulted in excise totals being cut in half as it is cannibalised by illegal vapes (with unknown ingredients in the juice) and the rampant proliferation of Double Happiness and other equally illegal tobacco imports.

At a structural level, we have, in short, ended up with the worst of both worlds with our policy. Hell, even the tobacco companies are in trouble now.

Systems and Incentives

Everything that has happened in this story is an entirely predictable function of the systems and incentives at play here.

On the demand side, endlessly squeezing consumers with ever-increasing taxes mean that they are inevitably going to turn to black-market options, and those black market options are going to be impossible to control the safety or quality of. There was a single, perfect moment in time where the government had the opportunity to actually change the long-term trajectory of this problem, and as usual it chose the worst possible option.

On the supply side, the incentive structure at the macro scale meant the worst possible option was the only politically viable one. A large-scale economic transition away from a major revenue source is a very bold move, and Australian politics is really not known for those. Aligning with suppliers mean that we've squandered a golden opportunity, and now we've actually ended up worse off overall.

In both cases, the topic was handled in isolation as a single problem, when in reality it was one component of many in a complex and interdependent ecosystem.

Cleaner delivery of vices is a powerful way to reduce harm, but it has to be respected as the systemic opportunity it is. The more we remove friction, the more sensitive these systems become to design — both on the supply and demand ends.

If we don't respect it appropriately, it'll backfire.

Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2025-12-23

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11 - likely causing significant cognitive impairment

Mental health was: fair - estimate 30% brain