New Zealand decided to legalise pouches. Then nothing happened.

On 24 July, Australia closed the last legal door.

No more personal importation. No more prescriptions through the Special Access Scheme. No pharmacist compounding. The Therapeutic Goods Administration, Australia’s equivalent of the FDA, shut every remaining pathway for a consumer to legally obtain a nicotine pouch. The reason given was the risk of nicotine dependence, especially among young people.

Six weeks earlier, the government’s own statisticians published the number that makes the decision hard to defend.

The number in the good news report

Australia’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey came out in July with a headline everyone wanted. Daily smoking down to 5.6%, a historic low. Health groups called it proof that Australia’s tobacco control settings work.

Further into the same report is this. One in three Australians who smoke, 34%, had recently used illicit tobacco. In 2022-23 the figure was 16.7%.

It doubled in two years.

Almost a quarter of smokers had bought branded illicit tobacco in the previous three months. Cigarettes with no plain packaging, no graphic warnings, no way to know what is in them. Another one in six were smoking unbranded loose tobacco.

Cut off the legal routes and something fills the gap. In Australia the thing filling it doesn’t check ID, doesn’t print warnings, doesn’t disclose nicotine content and doesn’t pay tax. Criminal groups have been firebombing tobacconists in Melbourne over the trade.

The government’s answer to a black market that doubled in two years was to create the conditions for another one. The same survey found 1.8% of Australians aged 14 and over had used nicotine pouches in the past year, roughly 400,000 people. On 24 July all of them became customers of somebody who isn’t regulated.

New Zealand’s version is stranger

Across the Tasman, pouches are also unavailable. But New Zealand didn’t decide that. New Zealand decided the opposite and then stopped.

Cabinet agreed in principle to legalise the sale of oral nicotine products. The Ministry of Health advised against it. Then nothing happened. No bill, no regulations, no announcement that the plan had been dropped. Two years on, pouches remain illegal to sell in New Zealand because a decision to allow them was never carried out.

That failure is worse than Australia’s, and it is worth being precise about why. Mark Butler has to stand behind his ban. He can be asked about the illicit tobacco figures and held to his answer. Nobody in Wellington has to defend anything, because the official policy is still that pouches will be legalised. What exists instead is an unexplained gap between a Cabinet decision and the statute book.

Meanwhile 294,000 New Zealanders smoke every day. The daily rate is 6.8%, and it hasn’t moved in three years. 6.8%, then 6.9%, then 6.8%. The Smokefree 2025 target of under 5% for every population group passed unmet. For Maori the rate is 15%.

Three consecutive years without progress is the part that should be provoking questions, and it goes wider than pouches. New Zealand hit a ceiling and hasn’t tried anything new since.

What Australia’s numbers do and don’t prove

Australia’s smoking rate is lower than New Zealand’s. 5.6% against 6.8%. Australia bans more, and by the headline measure it does better. Anyone arguing that prohibition simply fails has to account for that, and most people making this argument don’t.

So here is the narrower claim, and it is the one I would defend. Prohibition moves some people out of the legal market and moves others into the illegal one. Australia has both effects running at once and its own survey measures both. The smoking rate fell. Illicit use among the remaining smokers doubled. Whether that is a good trade depends on how much weight you give the people left behind, who are disproportionately poor and now buying from criminals.

New Zealand’s position is harder to defend than Australia’s, not easier. Australia at least chose a strategy. New Zealand has a rate that has flatlined for three years, a Smokefree target it missed, and a Cabinet decision it hasn’t implemented.

Shvetsiya

Depending on which Swedish agency you ask, daily smoking is either 3.7% or about 5.4%. The Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs reports the lower figure for 2025. The Public Health Agency of Sweden reports the higher one for ages 16 to 84 in 2024. Harm reduction advocates quote the first. Take whichever you prefer. Sweden has the lowest smoking prevalence in the European Union either way, against an EU average around 24%.

What Sweden did was not ban the alternatives. Snus has been sold there for generations and pouches followed. Smokeless products overtook cigarettes among Swedish men in the 1990s. Nicotine without combustion, sold legally, taxed and age restricted.

Whether that caused the low smoking rate or only accompanied it is still argued among researchers. But Sweden is the only European country where smoking essentially collapsed, and it got there without prohibiting the substitute.

The question for New Zealand

New Zealand votes on 7 November. Nobody is going to campaign on nicotine pouches, and nobody should. There are larger things at stake.

But somebody should ask the question, because the answer takes one sentence and nobody has given it. Cabinet agreed in principle to legalise these products. Why is that decision still sitting on a desk two years later?

If the government changed its mind, say so and explain why. If the Ministry’s advice was persuasive, publish the reasoning and let people argue with it. If it was forgotten in the queue, that is the most honest answer and the most damning one, because 294,000 people are smoking daily while it sits there.

Australia made a choice I disagree with. New Zealand hasn’t made one at all.