Old Goat
Administrator
Well, would you look at that.
Australia, already the self-appointed headmaster of anti-vape hysteria, has now been handed another stick to beat the entire vaping world with.
Etomidate in illegal vapes.
Not nicotine.
Not a badly labelled custard.
Not some scary-sounding flavour chemical being dragged out of context.
Etomidate.
A powerful anaesthetic drug.
A hospital-grade sedative turning up in illegal vape products sold in Melbourne.
And there it is.
The headline every anti-vape campaigner was waiting for.
The kind of story that makes politicians sit up, lick their lips, and say, “See? We told you vaping was dangerous.”
Except here is the part they will conveniently skip:
This is not normal vaping.
This is not adult smokers buying a known nicotine liquid from a reputable shop.
This is not a DIY mixer using known ingredients.
This is not a regulated product.
This is the black market.
This is what happens when you push demand underground, make legal access awkward, expensive, limited, medicalised, over-controlled, and then act shocked when illegal sellers fill the gap with mystery rubbish.
Australia wanted to be clever.
They did not build a sensible adult vaping market with proper age checks, proper product standards, proper labelling, proper retailer licensing, proper enforcement and proper consumer choice.
No.
They tried to shove vaping into a pharmacy model.
Because apparently an adult smoker cannot be trusted to buy a vape from a specialist vape shop, but can buy cigarettes from normal retail without needing a little counselling session under fluorescent pharmacy lights.
Brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
Legal cigarette?
No problem.
Adult smoker wants a less harmful alternative?
Please report to the pharmacy counter, discuss your nicotine dependence, hope they stock something useful, hope the product is available, hope the rules make sense, and please accept your government-approved flavour of disappointment.
And while all that paperwork is busy patting itself on the back, the black market is outside selling whatever it wants.
That is the part that drives me mad.
Because prohibition does not kill demand.
It redirects it.
You do not make vaping disappear by making legal access stupid. You just hand the market to people who do not care about standards, age gates, ingredients, traceability, safety, labels, testing, or whether the person using the product wakes up on the floor.
And now we have this.
A powerful sedative in illegal vapes.
A product that should never be anywhere near the vape conversation now gets dragged into it because some black-market cowboy decided nicotine was not enough and apparently wanted to turn a vape into a hospital trolley with a mouthpiece.
This is not a vaping success story.
This is a policy failure story.
But watch how it will be used.
They will not say, “Maybe we should rethink whether prohibition-style controls are feeding the illegal market.”
They will not say, “Maybe adults need a legal, regulated, realistic pathway that actually competes with black-market supply.”
They will not say, “Maybe specialist retailers with licences, inspections and harsh penalties for selling to minors could have been a better option than driving everything underground.”
No.
They will say, “Vapes are dangerous.”
All vapes.
Every vape.
Your nicotine device.
Your refillable pod.
Your DIY bottle.
Your tobacco harm-reduction tool.
Your quit-smoking lifeline.
Everything gets thrown into the same sack because one illegal product was contaminated with a powerful sedative.
That is the scam.
Take the worst black-market example, hold it up like it represents the entire category, then use it to justify making the legal market even smaller.
And then, when the black market gets worse, blame vaping again.
Round and round we go.
Australia has already been one of the loudest examples of what happens when government policy treats adult vapers like patients, vape shops like criminals, and cigarettes like some unavoidable part of the furniture.
The legal pathway becomes narrow.
The black market gets fat.
The public gets scared.
The media gets headlines.
The campaigners get ammunition.
And adult smokers get caught in the middle, staring at the cigarette shelf and wondering why the product that actually kills people is somehow still the easy one to buy.
Let me be clear.
No one should touch these mystery “space” vapes.
No one should buy black-market rubbish.
No one should gamble with unknown liquids, unknown pods, unknown chemicals, or unknown drugs hiding inside a device.
If a vape contains etomidate, opioids, synthetic nonsense, or any other mystery substance, that is not vaping.
That is drug roulette in a plastic tube.
But that is exactly why black markets are dangerous.
They do not care.
They do not test.
They do not label honestly.
They do not care if you are a teenager, an adult smoker, a tourist, a recovering smoker, or someone who just grabbed the wrong thing from the wrong person.
They care about money.
That is what bans and broken regulation feed.
And now Australia’s anti-vape crowd will point at the monster that their own policy environment helped grow and say, “See? More bans.”
No.
The lesson here is not “ban harder.”
The lesson is: stop handing the market to criminals.
Regulate properly.
Control age access properly.
Punish sellers who target kids properly.
Destroy the disposable junk pipeline properly.
Set product standards properly.
Let adult smokers access known, tested, traceable nicotine products without sending them into a maze.
Because if your legal system makes the safer, known option difficult while the illegal mystery option is easy, you have not protected the public.
You have built a black-market vending machine.
And now something as ugly as etomidate turns up in illegal vapes, and everyone acts surprised.
The Old Goat is not surprised.
Angry, yes.
Surprised, no.
This is what happens when fear writes the law, politicians chase headlines, and adult harm reduction gets thrown under the bus.
So yes, Australia just got more ammo.
But the honest question is not, “How do we punish vaping even more?”
The honest question is:
How badly does a policy have to fail before the people who wrote it stop calling it a success?
Potent sedative found in vapes sold in Melbourne
Victorian health authorities say vape products containing the powerful sedative etomidate have been found being sold illegally.
www.abc.net.au
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