Vapes (e-cigarettes) are promoted as a disruptive technology capable of displacing cigarette smoking and accelerating the end of the tobacco use. However, the majority of people who use vapes to quit smoking do not switch completely to vaping. Vaping then becomes layered on top of smoking. Dual use, vaping while continuing to smoke, risks delivering the harms of both products while weakening the behavioural, social and policy forces that have driven decades of progress in tobacco control. Vaping may also undermine smokefree norms, confuse enforcement, and re-socialise nicotine use as ordinary, convenient, and fashionable. Evidence from the Generation Vape study shows how quickly vapes became normalised among young Australians: cheap, flavoured, disposable, nicotine-containing products are easy to access, socially visible and heavily promoted through retail and digital environments. This rise in youth vaping threatens to create new nicotine dependence among people who may never have smoked, while also increasing susceptibility to smoking. Among adults who smoke, vaping is often used as a way to “cut down”, but continued smoking, even at reduced levels, maintains substantial increased disease risk. The worst-case future is a poly-use nicotine market where cigarettes remain highly profitable, vapes recruit and retain new users, and more forms of non-therapeutic nicotine (nicotine pouches for example) are introduced, resulting in the tobacco industry continuing to benefit from addiction across more places, products and moments of the day. The public health goals of tobacco and vape control policy in Australia are clear: fewer people smoking, fewer young people vaping, and a future free from nicotine addiction.