The hardline proposal is part of a university's plan to end smoking forever, and includes cutting off cigarette sales permanently to anyone born after a certain date.
Associate Professor Coral Gartner, from the University of Queensland's Centre for Research Excellence on Achieving the Tobacco Endgame (CREATE), says smoking may never be outlawed but there must be an 'endgame' goal to permanently reduce the use of tobacco which causes nearly 'one in seven deaths' in Australia and is responsible for 'nine percent of the disease burden'.
'Examples of proposed endgame approaches include regulating the content and emissions of tobacco products to make them non-addictive, less palatable, or to remove the most harmful products from the market entirely based on their toxicant profile,' Professor Gartner wrote in an paper for the Medical Journal of Australia's news publication Insight.
'Proposed supply reduction strategies range from reducing the number of tobacco retailers, restricting sales to particular categories of suppliers (eg, pharmacies), ending sales to everyone born after a certain year, phasing out commercial cigarette sales and regulated markets or non-profit supply models.'
Although 2.3 million Australians light up everyday, the prevalence of smoking is under 15 per cent - one of the lowest rates in the world.
Professor Gartner says 15 per cent is the 'critical point an endgame becomes politically feasible'.
Among the strategies the federal government has already implemented is raising the cost of tobacco products through incremental tax increases.
The government has hiked the excise and customs duty on tobacco by 12.5 per cent each year from 2013 to 2020, the most recent just last month.
The excise also spiked a further 25 per cent on a one-off basis in 2010 - adding up to a 125 per cent total hike in excise over the past decade.
This has driven up the price of a 25-pack of Marlboro cigarettes to about $50 over the past decade.
But in a rare showing of generosity, last week's coronavirus-delayed federal budget spared smokers another double-digit tax increase for the first time in almost a decade.
The Australian government rakes in about $17billion dollars a year in tobacco excise.
However, this has led to a surge in black market tobacco trade as organised crime syndicates flood the Australian market with cheap smokes.
The illegal tobacco trade is worth about 600million dollars annually, according to the Australian Border Force.
But Professor Gartner says concerns about illegal tobacco are overblown.
'Evidence suggests the potential adverse impacts of other tobacco control strategies have been exaggerated, such as speculation about increased black-market sales in response to plain packaging,' she said.
'Achieving an end to the cigarette epidemic will be challenging, but will deliver immense health gains exceeding those possible via other health interventions.'
By 2025, The Australian government aims to reduce the rate of smoking to 10 percent of the population.
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