A vaping lobby group with links to tobacco companies is running ads in Australian newspapers calling for the government to abandon its vaping reforms, in a campaign ministers and experts say is misdirecting the public.
A campaign called Bust the Black Market ran full page advertisements in The Australian and the Daily Telegraph this week calling for e-cigarettes to be regulated “like tobacco and alcohol”.
The ads were authorised by Brian Marlow, the executive director of the Australian Taxpayers Alliance, which has also been behind the Legalise Vaping Australia initiative.
The alliance does not disclose its funders, but has admitted to receiving social media advice from British American Tobacco and in 2021 reportedly partnered with a lobby group funded by Philip Morris International to try to overturn nicotine e-cigarette laws in Australia.
The health minister, Mark Butler, said “the only groups who want to regulate and sell vaping products are those who profit once kids get hooked on nicotine – Big Tobacco and tobacco retailers”.
“Vape shops are deliberately setting up down the road from schools – it’s an industry targeting their product to kids,” Butler said. “That’s why we are taking on Big Tobacco so they can’t continue to get a new generation addicted to nicotine.”
The advertisements claim the vaping reforms will only “benefit the criminals already selling dangerous, unregulated vaping products” and claim “there is a better way. Strictly regulate vapes like tobacco and alcohol”.
Prof Becky Freeman, a tobacco control expert at the University of Sydney, said “this is the same group that has been fighting vaping regulations for the past few years, and they’re very opposed to any sort of regulation of vaping products that doesn’t suit a retail commercial model”.
“They misdirect people in their campaign in making it seem like vaping is going to be banned, that there’ll be no way to get these products. And actually we are regulating vaping products just like they call for in their campaign.
“They’re going to be regulated to the extent that they will only be available in pharmacies, to adults who will benefit from them to quit smoking,” Freeman said.
A ban on the importation of disposable single-use vapes came into effect on 1 January and further legislation planned for later this year will prevent their sale without a prescription.
On its website the campaign calls for retailers to be forced to have a licence to sell vapes. Freeman said the government’s regulation “is the ultimate form of licensing: the only retail outlet they’ll be available in is a pharmacy. It’ll be highly controlled. Right now, where we have non nicotine vapes that are legally available in all kinds of shops is just not working.
“These retailers are not responsible to be able to handle these products. They’re selling them to children, they’re lying about what’s in them, and the model’s simply not working.”
The campaign’s key messages on their website are that the government’s reforms will drive a black market, enforcement will fail, and that it hasn’t worked in any other country.
The argument that reforms will fuel the black market were rejected by health experts in a November Senate hearing.
Freeman said: “The black market right now is a broad daylight market … they’re being openly sold in defiance of the law in shops because it’s so impossible to enforce.”
The government’s reforms would help crack down on illegal sales because there would be “no more back and forth about nicotine vapes versus non-nicotine”, she said.
“We only have phase one of the government’s plan in place so far, which is turning off the tap of importation, we need this retail sales ban to really see these laws become effective and to make enforcement possible.
“The third key message here, it hasn’t worked in any other country … No other country has this model in place.
“If you look at other countries that have allowed nicotine vaping products as a consumer good [including the UK, New Zealand, US and Canada], their youth vaping rates are even higher than they are in Australia,” Freeman said.
“So for Australia to take a much more progressive, firmer stance on these products, and to make them only available in pharmacies, the rest of the world is going to be looking to us to see if this works.”
