Smoking is down, vaping is down, and Australia is consuming more nicotine than ever
Nicotine pouches enter the national drug survey for the first time, used by 8.4 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds, while overall nicotine consumption climbs.
Daily smoking in Australia has fallen to 5.6 per cent, the lowest ever recorded.
Vaping is off its peak too. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, less-frequent use dropped from 11.3 per cent to 5.8.
That was the story everywhere on Friday.
Here is what ran underneath it.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare put oral nicotine pouches in the National Drug Strategy Household Survey for the first time this year.
They are small tobacco-free sachets of nicotine powder, held between the lip and the gum. Zyn is the brand most people would know. Nothing burns, nothing is inhaled, and nobody can see you using one.
Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 8.4 per cent had used them in the past year. Another 3.8 per cent used snus, the older tobacco version.
Highest of any age group, in the first year anyone asked — and both are already illegal to sell here.
Daily vaping among that same age group barely moved: 9.3 per cent in 2022-23, 8.3 in 2025. What collapsed was the casual end.
The occasional users quit. The dependent ones didn't. And they are the ones now holding the pouches.
The proportion of Australians using three or more forms of nicotine has nearly doubled since the last survey.
“The thing that's most concerning to me is this new pattern of use among people who use nicotine, and that they're not just either vaping or not just smoking; they're using multiple nicotine products at once,” said Becky Freeman, a University of Sydney public health professor with more than two decades in tobacco control.
“Maybe they're smoking on Friday and Saturday nights. They're using a vape during the week at work, and then they're popping a pouch in their mouth for those times where they can't vape or smoke.”
“That's keeping them in that nicotine addiction for longer.”
Then there's the other substitution.
Illicit tobacco use among smokers doubled in three years, from 16.7 per cent to 34 per cent. Of those buying branded illicit tobacco — no plain packaging, no health warnings — 57 per cent got it from a tobacconist.
Not a laneway. A shopfront, with a counter and an ABN.
“You can walk down your local high street, and a shop will just sell it to you in broad daylight,” Freeman said.
Even the tobacco industry isn't buying the good news. British American Tobacco Australia answered the survey with a statement listing the firebombings, the retailers openly selling illicit cigarettes, the nicotine in the wastewater, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics finding nicotine consumption up around 40 per cent between 2017 and 2025.
The statement, in full, read: “Sure…”
The ABS number is the one that bites. Consumption up almost 40 per cent since 2017 against population growth of 14 per cent, with illicit sources now 80 per cent of every gram of nicotine consumed here.
The government's answer to the pouches is another ban. From July 24 the last legal doors close — no personal importation, no prescription, no compounding at a pharmacy.
Roughly the answer given to vapes in 2024. The pouches arrived anyway.
The nicotine didn't leave. It changed shape, and the survey only just learned to look for it.