The Australian authorities mentioned it needed to crack down on the usage of e-cigarettes in an effort to “cut back smoking and stamp out vaping” in one of the vital sweeping tobacco regulatory strikes within the nation in years.
The proposal, introduced on Tuesday, would ban all single-use, disposable vapes; cease the importation of nonprescription vapes; require “pharmaceutical-like packaging”; cut back nicotine concentrations and quantities; and limit sure flavors, colours and substances.
The federal authorities would additionally work with states and territories to finish the sale of vapes in comfort shops and different retail settings “whereas additionally making it simpler to get a prescription for reputable therapeutic use,” the Division of Well being and Aged Care mentioned in an announcement.
Nicotine vapes are at the moment out there solely with a prescription in Australia, however they thrive on the black market, particularly amongst younger individuals. Whereas the contours of the proposal are nonetheless tentative, Mark Butler, the well being minister, mentioned its long-term intentions have been clear.
“I would like vaping to return to the aim that we have been advised it was invented for, that could be a therapeutic product to assist long-term people who smoke stop,” Mr. Butler mentioned in a speech on the Nationwide Press Membership of Australia on Tuesday. “We have been promised this was a pathway out of smoking, not a pathway into smoking. That’s what it has grow to be. That’s what it has been bought as so shamelessly and offered as.”
Particularly, Mr. Butler mentioned, the federal government desires “to stamp out the concept this can be a leisure product in any respect, however notably a leisure product for our children.”
“Knocking that market out is what I’m aiming for,” he mentioned.
The Meals and Drug Administration in america says there’s not sufficient proof to assist claims, mirrored in some research, that e-cigarettes are much less dangerous than conventional cigarettes, which coat the lungs in tar. The F.D.A. additionally mentioned that no e-cigarette has been accepted as a “cessation system.”
The F.D.A. started to crack down on vape makers in recent times as younger individuals bought hooked on the fruity flavors of vapes, and lots of confirmed signs of mysterious and life-threatening vaping-related diseases.
Mr. Butler mentioned the Australian authorities had no plans to ban smoking or to section out smoking by start yr, as New Zealand did lately when it positioned a lifetime prohibition on cigarette gross sales to everybody born after 2008.
In its assertion, the federal government referred to as the technique a “new nationwide framework” to scale back day by day smoking charges throughout Australia.
Australia’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, will ship the federal authorities’s annual working finances to Parliament on Might 9. It can embody 737 million Australian {dollars}, or almost $492 million, in funding for the initiative.
The finances will name for a 5 p.c annual enhance within the tobacco tax, efficient Sept. 1, producing a further 3.3 billion Australian {dollars}, or about $2.2 billion, in income over 4 years. Mr. Butler mentioned on Tuesday that the federal government would largely make investments that cash within the nation’s well being system, together with a brand new nationwide lung most cancers screening program, most cancers care providers for Indigenous teams and packages to scale back vaping and smoking amongst First Nations Australians.
However the focus of the initiative, Mr. Butler mentioned, was to “shut down a serious well being threat to the youngest era of Australians.”
“Everyone knows this as we work together as mother and father or uncles and aunties with younger college college students — it’s simply flourishing, notably over the course of Covid,” he mentioned. “We’re going to need to shut down an trade, a market that has been allowed to develop up, regardless of the truth that it wasn’t actually purported to.”
However Nicole Lee, an adjunct professor on the Nationwide Drug Analysis Institute at Curtin College, mentioned she was skeptical that this sort of method would have the impact on the black market that regulators hoped it could. A scarcity of main care medical doctors implies that these searching for prescriptions for vapes are much less more likely to get them, placing extra stress on an already explosive black market.
“We wish to see decreased entry and we wish to see individuals ready to make use of it for quitting smoking,” she mentioned. “Quasi banning it means the black market will flourish and younger individuals have extra entry, not much less entry.”
Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.
