From July 1st 2024 it will be illegal to own or buy any vaping device other than from pharmacies, and flavours will be limited to mint, menthol and tobacco. Further, vapes and liquid will have to be sold in plain packaging. This is just crazy and takes away from smokers a device, which is undoubtedly the most successful smoking cessation tool in history.
Vaping is to smoking what methadone is to street heroin. While neither is completely safe, both significantly reduce harm. About 21,000 Australians still die from a smoking-related illness every year – more deaths than from all other drugs combined. Yes, the smoking rate has declined, but it has been virtually flat since 2013 despite aggressive tobacco control policies including sky-high taxes.
I myself was a heavy smoker for more than forty years; when I finally managed to quit I was going through a pouch of tobacco a day - around 50 - 60 rollies a day. I tried many times to quit over the years, and it was not until I took to vaping that I managed. I've been five plus years smoke free now. Thankfully I live in the UK where vaping laws are more more based on common sense and the available scientific data. The NHS states vaping is 95% safer than smoking and that's good enough for me. Though it does worry me that given the irresponsible anti-vaping articles that appear in the tabloids on a regular basis that we could go the same way as the Aussies. The anti-vape hysteria is driven by ignorance and, dare I say it, the invested interests of big tobacco.
Greg Hunt, the Australian health establishment and the World Health Organisation are deeply entrenched in their positions against tobacco harm reduction and this disruptive innovation. Yet they will eventually lose. It is nonsensical to make vaping, the less risky nicotine option, hard to get while cigarettes, the much more risky option, can be bought easily from 20,000 outlets across the country. And when there is strong demand for a commodity and the legal supply is closed or becomes exceedingly difficult, other illegal sources inevitably emerge.
The critics argue that vaping hasn’t been around long enough for all its negatives to be known. Yet cigarette smoke contains 7000 chemicals at high concentration, whereas vaping aerosol contains fewer than 300 chemicals, mostly at trace concentration. Surely this has to be a much lower risk. Even with unknown risks, the Royal College of Physicians estimates that the long-term risks of vaping are likely to be no more than 5% of the risk of smoking. Common sense should tell us that vaping is far safer than smoking.
Yes, there is a problem with children vaping, thinking it's cool but only a few decades ago those self same children would have been experimenting with cigarettes.
Bloody Aussies - first they inflict Fosters Larger and dodgy soap operas on the world and now this!!!
