We cover Australia quite a lot on CTA, but you’re the first Aussie we’ve had on this slot so far…
Well, I’m honoured.
So I kind of have to start with, what the hell is going on over there? The Government seems to be doubling down on a massive policy failure.
Look, I can’t say much more other than they are idiots. Idiots who think that they’re mighty in regards to tobacco control. That combination of ego and idiocy is driving their response to vaping.
Back in the eighties, Australia was actually really good at harm reduction. We had the first needle and syringe exchange programs for intravenous drug users. We had the first government funded peer education programme for sex workers. We really embraced harm reduction: I was even able to start a supervised injecting room. But while we’re happy to give someone a safe place to use heroin, we’re not happy to give them a safer nicotine product.
One thing I don’t understand is this great contrast with New Zealand where you had a center left government that decided that it was all in on tobacco harm reduction; but a center left government in Australia going completely the other way. What explains the difference?
They seem to actively ignore what’s happening in New Zealand. Which is highly unusual for Australians because we’re so competitive with New Zealand. You would think we would be trying to win this one, but we’re letting New Zealand’s smoking rates drop much lower than Australia. They’re going to reach a smoke free classification probably by next year. And Australia is probably never going to reach it the way it’s going right now.
On the ground, the reality is – in Victoria at least – you have two really heavy biker gangs, the Mongols and the Comancheros, who are fighting over a multimillion dollar illicit tobacco industry; and now they’re doing the same over vaping. Retailers can’t say no to these gangs because they’re afraid of being firebombed. The convenience store associations talk about the fact that their tobacconist members have halved their turnover because of this. But we have not seen a reduction in smoking.
This is a pretty awful turn of phrase but tobacco control is kind of a “lefty” issue. At least the people I know in tobacco control tend to skew left in their politics. But the left usually supports harm reduction. Do you find now that the people that you worked with back in the day on other forms of harm reduction have kind of shunned you? How does that dynamic work?
I have tried to raise vaping with many harm reduction people in Australia. People who are at the coal face say things like “I can keep someone who is addicted to heroin alive, and on a path to recovery, but what they will die from is smoking”. I’ll then suggest vaping and the response will be “Oh, we couldn’t do that. No. They just need to quit”.
So there is blindness, although it is starting to change. We are starting to see some of our harm reduction organizations get on board with tobacco harm reduction, but it’s taken them ten years. And we’re still seeing media misinformation out there. If I wanted to get a story in the media about sex work, no problem. I wanna get one in on cannabis law reform, no problem. Supervised injecting rooms for heroin users. Easy. Vaping? Forget it.
So what sparked your interest in these issues?
I used to volunteer doing needle and syringe exchange during the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic; we would hand out clean syringes from a mobile bus! That’s how I first got to understand harm reduction back in the 1980s.
I then got involved in campaigning for sex work decriminalization. I worked as a sex worker for some time, not a very long time; and I had friends who were gay, or sex workers, or drug users: I guess you could say I had a misspent youth! But that was my tribe. And my tribe was dying from HIV and AIDS.
I have been a harm reduction activist and called for drug law and sex work reform ever since then. Vaping came later.
But before that you went into politics, right?
So with my partner, Robbie Swan, we founded the Australian Sex Party, which was a federal political party in 2010. We campaigned on civil liberties, an adult’s right to choose, reproductive health and so on. We were born out of a sex industry association, believe it or not! I was a lobbyist for them for a number of years.
We contested a bunch of elections and I was elected in 2014, then reelected in 2018, but we had changed the name of the party from the Australian Sex Party to Reason Australia.
I used to hold the balance of power in the senate pretty much in the legislative council for all 8 years I was in there. And we were likened to the Star Wars bar with those sitting on the crossbench. It was this incredibly diverse range of libertarians, vegans, conservatives, Christians. It was quite the mix.
We lost in 2022 but we’d had 8 years in the Victoria legislative council, which was not bad for an upstart party. I’ll be running for the federal senate in the next federal election, which should be in May.
But Australian politics is being as brutal as it is, you never know. Right?
Nope. Never know. But I think we’ll see a federal election in May.
Do drug users and sex workers have higher smoking rates than the general population?
Certainly drug users, and particularly intravenous drug users, have much higher smoking rates. Sex workers, on the other hand, their smoking rates were akin to nurses and other shift workers. Shift workers in general have higher rates of smoking.
So was that how tobacco harm reduction came across your desk, or are you just like the rest of us? You found a vape and, figured this was a good idea?
Kind of a bit of both. One of my guiding lights and mentors over my career has been Alex Wodak. He was one of the major harm reduction campaigners here and he first spoke to me about vaping. We were starting to see vaping stores pop up: you couldn’t sell nicotine in Australia, but you could sell vape devices and people could then send off for nicotine from abroad. We then had the Royal College of Physicians come out in favour of tobacco harm reduction; but at the same time we saw governments wanting to ban vaping altogether. That was when I really got involved.
I did also manage to quit smoking with vaping: I had smoked since I was a teenager.
So the last question. I ask this to everybody and I try not to phrase it too delicately: how do harm reduction advocates in Australia pay the bills?
Well, I don’t get any tobacco money, and I don’t get paid for my tobacco for my vaping advocacy. Never have. Everyone who does it here is a volunteer. Some alliances do get money through the tobacco retailers, but those aren’t big tobacco folks. They’re the guys getting firebombed by biker gangs and would love to sell a regulated product instead. Why shouldn’t they fund this kind of activism?
