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Burning out: how Australia’s bid to cut smoking rates exploded into suburban tobacco wars

With the illicit market worth at least $2bn a year and the rise of illegal vapes, experts say the status quo is failing

There are three tobacconists in a strip of no more than a dozen shops on the same side of a street in Melbourne’s west. Earlier this year, someone reached between the metal bars protecting one shop, smashed the front window and flung a molotov cocktail inside.

Eight days later, a driver rammed the security screen at a second store and tried to set it alight before fleeing. A jerry can was left on the street as if in homage to the failed arson.

Such fires at such stores have occurred on high streets across Victoria over the past 18 months. In most cases, the businesses are still trading, neon signs flashing and customers coming and going.

There is no indication they were so recently embroiled in a fight between organised crime groups that is threatening one of Australia’s signature public health achievements: reducing the rate of smoking. Arson attacks across four states have left the federal government in a particularly invidious position: wedged between underworld figures and big tobacco companies.

While the firebombings – of which there have been more than 120 since the start of last year – have captured attention, there has been little consideration of how the problem of illicit tobacco built over the past decade during a time Australia was becoming a world leader in restricting tobacco use.

Nearly 30 people were contacted for this story. None suggested maintaining the status quo.

Many acknowledged the bind the government was in: if it blinks on the excise for legal tobacco and make the illicit market less valuable, it would probably improve the bottom line for multinational tobacco companies.

Illegal cigarettes are about half the price of legal cigarettes and are widely available, but not from shadowy figures on street corners or from shady websites on the dark web. Instead, according to police, they are often sold from shopfronts that are rapidly expanding in number throughout the country.

These factors make it less likely that smoking addicts will be encouraged to quit, growing the black market that has sparked what police believe is a turf war between organised crime groups.

At the same time, legal vapes previously promoted as way to cut tobacco use have become heavily restricted, despite those products often being sold illegally from the very same shops.

“It’s a really difficult place that the country is currently in,” says Kathryn Steadman, an associate professor from the University of Queensland.

“Tobacco is such an awful thing, it’s so detrimental to public health.

“Anybody who wants to stamp out tobacco doesn’t necessarily think [the current approach] is the best way to go, but we work within that framework.”

John Coyne, the head of strategic policing and law enforcement at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says public health experts and enforcement agencies agreed about the ideal outcome but were failing to make it happen.

“There have been unintended consequences of this policy,” he says. “It is no longer working so we need to adjust that.”

Where there’s smoke
In 2011, as Australia was being lauded for being the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging restrictions for cigarettes, a man who would also shake up the tobacco market was sentenced to another stint in prison.

Kazem Hamad was 27, had spent much of adolescence in rough suburbs in Melbourne’s outer north, and had known little but crime and hardship since birth.

His father was a political activist against the Saddam Hussein regime and was imprisoned in Iraq from 1984 until 1992, according to court material seen by Guardian Australia. One of his brothers died in the country before the family fled, travelling through Jordan and Syria until they were accepted as refugees in Australia.

Hamad arrived in Australia aged 14, and lasted only a year at school, as he struggled with English.

A court heard in 2010 that he had “a turbulent and traumatic early history”, and a forensic and clinical psychologist who prepared a report on him found that as a child during the Gulf War he saw mutilated bodies.

“While being initially traumatised by these experiences … it seems that he became increasingly inured to violence and conflict as a result of these childhood experiences,” the psychologist found.

In 2014, Hamad was charged as part of an Australian federal police investigation into heroin trafficking.

“Mixing with unsavoury characters led you into drug use and antisocial behaviour, which is reflected throughout your extensive prior criminal history,” a judge found in sentencing him for those offences in 2019.

He was deported to Iraq after completing his sentence in 2023, joining an increasingly large number of Australian organised crime figures based offshore.

Multiple law enforcement sources confirmed Hamad was thought of as an influential figure in the underworld, with a loyal and ruthless crew.

But, previously, he was not thought of a mastermind. He was the sort of person who involved himself in other people’s drug importations rather than organising them himself, and favoured ripping off people he thought of as weak, or using younger more expendable offenders to conduct rudimentary but potentially lucrative crimes, rather than planning more elaborate offending.

This included running crews of armed robbers who targeted service stations and other businesses selling cigarettes, and then on-selling these stolen products to other retailers.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/02/burning-out-how-australias-bid-to-cut-smoking-rates-exploded-into-suburban-tobacco-wars

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