Police running out of room to store illegal cigarettes they’ve seized amid Australia’s booming illicit trade
Australian police are facing challenges in storing a growing number of illegal cigarettes and vapes due to limited capacity in secure facilities. The cost of destroying these illicit products has also surged, creating additional pressures on law enforcement. The booming illicit tobacco trade has resulted in significant financial losses for the federal budget and has been linked to broader criminal activities.
- ▪The Australian federal police has reported that storage facilities are at capacity due to the increasing volume of seized illegal products.
- ▪Destruction costs for illegal vapes can reach $13 per kilogram, with large-scale seizures becoming prohibitively expensive.
- ▪Since 2016, approximately 2.66 billion illegal cigarettes and 7.5 million e-cigarette products have been seized in Australia.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — World |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/18/illegal-tobacco-cigarettes-vapes-australia-police-run-out-storage |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 07:12:30 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T07:24:56.098Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T07:24:56.098Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | qeVsbApAACaB |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s Adam Meyer speaks at the parliamentary inquiry into illegal tobacco. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAPView image in fullscreenThe Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s Adam Meyer speaks at the parliamentary inquiry into illegal tobacco. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAPAustralian police and policingPolice running out of room to store illegal cigarettes they’ve seized amid Australia’s booming illicit tradeInquiry into black market hears cost of destroying vapes has also soared, with some requiring manual dismantling Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Tom McIlroy Political editorMon 18 May 2026 03.12 EDTLast modified on Mon 18 May 2026 03.13 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian…
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