In terms of rates of smoking, it is going well. Australia has the second lowest smoking rate of any country where women smoking isn’t taboo. (I.e., the only countries with lower smoking rates are New Zealand and a short list of countries where it’s culturally unacceptable for women to smoke.
While the article you linked points out that illicit tobacco sales make up a large percentage of the market, it’s a much smaller market. You might as well tell us that most guns sold in Japan are illegal, and therefore Japan has a bigger problem with guns than America.
The article notes that according to wastewater testing, nicotine consumption in Australia is at an all-time high.
I'm no fan of tobacco, I think taxing it heavily is good, and Australia's policies were (IMHO) working well until quite recently. But, as the article explains at length, the price difference is now so extreme and the legal risk of illegal sales so low that drug dealers are muscling in and we're getting drug dealer competition tactics as a result.
The article is about gambling in the U.S., not cigarettes in Australia.
Also, these policies usually fail in getting existing users to quit, but they succeed in deterring prospective users. The idea that these policies are "not going very well" is an incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted perspective.
Did you read the article? By effectively banning legal vape sales to all (including consenting adults), there's now an explosion of completely unregulated vapes in the illegal market catering to all and sundry including children.
There are countries that let people do fentanyl out in the middle of the road because they're unable to enforce basic laws. Then there are countries that give people the death penalty for having a few grams of a common herb. Whether laws are enforced and enforced predictably and equally to everyone determine the effectiveness of a ban.
Australia doesn't let you bring a bottle of water onto planes going into their country, even if you bought it inside the airport. Allowing people to bring in drugs like tobacco but strictly forbidding a 1 dollar bottle of water is a problem with enforcement. If tobacco were treated the same way dangerous, addictive substances like H2O are, things might work better.
Per TFA, the people of New Jersey voted in a referendum to make it legal by a 2/3 supermajority, for example. Why should it be illegal if most people don't want it to be?
I'd like to see how many would vote the same way again, now that they've seen the outcome. But they probably won't be given the opportunity to vote on it again, now that the commercial interests got what they want.
