If the Australian government’s plan to ban recreational vaping – particularly among teenagers – succeeds, there won’t be any more sales of disposable vapes at corner stores, no flavours, no branding or colourful packaging. In fact, the only place where it will be legal to buy one will be at a pharmacy, and even then it will require a prescription.
But the big unanswered question is will this bold scheme work?
“No jurisdiction or country has yet been able to meaningfully reduce youth vaping rates once it has reached popular use,” says Becky Freeman, a professor of public health and tobacco control expert with the University of Sydney.
Some regions have been successful in preventing rapid youth uptake or keeping youth uptake low, such as China (though China exports them, including to Australia) and Brazil, where all vaping products are banned, including for those who want to quit smoking.
Freeman says this is why Australia has needed to take the prescription route, so those who want to use vapes to quit smoking can do so, combined with stronger regulation and enforcement that aims to prevent others, particularly children, from using them.
There’s not a lot of data around yet on how regulation affects e-cigarette use, because it’s all relatively new. However, in the US, laws introduced in 2021 in a bid to tackle youth vaping required any seller to register and to enforce more stringent age verification requirements.
It followed a US ban on Juul’s flavoured vaping products in 2019. While US youth vaping rates appeared to be plateauing, 2022 data reveals that rates are once again back to pre-Covid pandemic levels. “Juul sales did dramatically reduce, however other companies stepped in, such as Puff Bar … and filled the void,” Freeman says.
She says unlike for cigarettes, where comprehensive education and reform has been in place for decades, the same cannot be said about efforts to reduce vaping. And while the health messages about tobacco smoking “have long been unambiguous, the clarity and consistency of messaging about vaping harms is lacking and misinformation is rife”. For example, the now debunked claim that vaping is “95% safer” than smoking is still often cited.
Freeman says for reform to work to reduce youth vaping, the Australian government needs to tackle the importation.
“The importation reform cuts the problem off at the source.”
Currently, Australians need a prescription to legally access nicotine e‑cigarette products. But manufacturers have been falsely labelling products as nicotine-free. The Australian Border Force (ABF) does not have powers to immediately seize and destroy suspected nicotine vaping products.
The ABF instead alerts the drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which then tests the products for nicotine. It is time-consuming and diverts ABF officers from priorities such as firearms, drugs and child sexual abuse material.
If the products are found to contain nicotine, destruction is complicated and expensive due to the high levels of plastic and numerous chemicals they contain.
The co-chief executive of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, Laura Hunter, has been in discussions with the ABF since the vaping reforms were announced to better understand how and if they will work. She says the ABF feels more confident in enforcement because the reforms will give officers the authority and resourcing to immediately trash any vaping products detected, including those bought online.
“Once the reforms are legislated, ABF’s role will be a simple matter of distinguishing what has a prescription and what doesn’t,” Hunter says.
Guardian Australia understands that all packages from target countries will be scanned, and any detected vape packages immediately disposed of if they do not have an accompanying authorisation for pharmacy use. However, the details of the reforms and any new legislation required are yet to be finalised.
This lack of detail makes it difficult to know whether the reforms will work, according to Associate Prof Ryan Courtney, lead of the tobacco research group at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.
For example, it may not stop recreational users or dealers from receiving illegal vapes they order online, while on the other hand it may encourage recreational vape users towards getting quit advice and a legal prescription, or drive vapers to the black market. It’s difficult to gauge.
Courtney, who conducts tobacco cessation research, says “we’re in uncharted waters” in that a prescription is being provided for a product that does not have drug regulator approval from the TGA or equivalent drugs regulators worldwide.
“Why would any regulator approve and register a product known to be harmful?” he says. “We know there are toxins in vapes you don’t want in your lungs, and yes, they’re probably much less harmful than cigarettes. But a regulator will compare these vape products, which have the risk of explosion and toxins, to approved products such as an asthma puffer, for example, or other nicotine replacement therapies. And when you compare a vaping product to the risk profile of these products, the vaping risk is so much higher and no one is going to regulate it.
“Yet consumers in Australia can get a script for vapes, which does send a bit of a confusing message.”
He says while vaping is “not going to be a gamechanger” when it comes to smoking cessation, it will help a small percentage of people. “There are other frontline treatments that should be recommended first,” he says.
“There’s a lot of regulation and laws that need to be written in terms of how the policy is going to be enforced related to sales that are illegal and strike a balance allowing access for those who want to quit, and until we see the detail, it’s hard to know if the reforms will stop recreational and illegal access.”
Prof Emily Banks, a physician and world-leading tobacco-control expert with the Australian National University, says key to whether the reforms work will be whether children find vapes easy to find after they are introduced.
“The problem we’ve got in Australia is that four-fifths of kids are saying that it’s easy to access vapes,” she says.
“They’re getting them from their friends. They’re getting them from the service station, they’re getting them from the convenience store. The idea here isn’t that you could ever completely eradicate the black market or stop people ever getting things online, but it’s taking it from a 13-year-old finding it easy to access an illegal product to it no longer being easy.
“It isn’t going to be about complete eradication of youth use or recreational use, but much more about shifting that balance from the current situation where we’ve got, where teachers are saying it’s their number one behavioural issue in schools, to it being a product much more targeted to adults who are using it to quit smoking.”
