Since last summer for certain types of cigarettes and from this summer for the rest, Canada is requiring that health warnings are printed on each individual cigarette stick drawn out of a packet, as if it did not bear health warnings instead of the cigarette! From the 1st of July 2025 the same will apply to Australia which has legislated individual stick health warnings on cigarettes last October along with a series of exhaustive and stringent restrictions on the manufacturing and sale of tobacco products.
As of the 1st of July, cigarettes sold in Australia must come in packets which contain up to 20 cigarettes maximum, each with a health warning message printed on the filtre in black on a white-coloured filtre like in Canada, no additives will be permitted in tobacco leaf including flavouring, and no descriptions to imply anything related to health will be allowed, which feels like a drastic change considering cigarettes are typically sold in that country in 25-packs.
Cigarettes cost AU$40 in Australia, the highest price in the world along with New Zealand where they cost NZ$40, and that is the equivalent of £21 fuelling the black market including widespread organised crime extending on an international scale, criminal activity in communities that includes frequent occurrences of robbery and arson on convenience stores and illicit counterfeit trade of contraband tobacco products under the complicity of desperate consumers.
The restrictions that come into force in July are additional to plain packaging that is in force from 2012 and was first legislated in Australia and are seeking to exhaust every possible restriction that concerns the sale of tobacco products. When plain packaging came into force in the UK by pre-Brexit Conservative health minister Jane Ellison (the relevant law was voted on the 20th of May 2016 and has been applied since September of 2018) contrary to the intentions of then prime minister David Cameron, it did not replace but introduced pictorial (illustrated) health warnings that were not being used until then instead of textboxes with printed messages.
The sale of vapourisers in Australia was legalised last year by the efforts of the Green Party that amended the law and are now sold without a prescription through pharmacies to those over the age of majority with limits on nicotine levels and flavours which may only be tobacco or menthol flavour.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 