Tobacco company Philip Morris International has made a deal with some Australian pharmacies to supply its VEEV vaping products below cost, despite the company’s opposition to the government’s new prescription vaping model.
VEEV marketing materials seen by Guardian Australia offer pharmacists an “introductory offer” to supply the nicotine pods and devices at an 80% margin on the condition they sign a supply agreement with Philip Morris International (PMI) directly.
The offer is also on the condition pharmacies do not sell a packet of two VEEV nicotine pods for more than $14.90 or devices for more than $19.90 – cheaper than what wholesalers can offer. The recommended retail price for comparable pod products is $24.99. The marketing material for the offer only mentions PMI in fine print at the bottom of the document.
The University of Sydney emeritus professor of public health and tobacco control Simon Chapman accused PMI of “playing a long game here to wreck the prescription access model by disrupting the competition”.
“PMI have been implacably opposed to the provision of nicotine vaping products via prescription, actively lobbying for a consumer model,” he said.
“Their efforts in Australia to eliminate competition via the 80% margin to pharmacists need to be considered in the context of its global ambitions to oppose prescribed access. Any tobacco company still actively marketing tobacco products and opposing effective tobacco control, while ostensibly trying promote a product with claims to move significant customers away from its tobacco products, is trying to walk on both sides of the street.”
The tobacco giant has been lobbying federal government MPs to overturn Australia’s ban on vaping.
Philip Morris, owner of six of the world’s 15 biggest cigarette brands, is in the midst of a significant push to grow global sales of its vaping products, predicting they will bring in between $17bn and $19bn by 2025, roughly 42% of its total revenue.
But the company’s plan has been hampered in Australia by the federal government’s effective ban on nicotine e-cigarettes.
Chapman argues peak pharmacy and health groups should be urging their members not to prescribe VEEV products or enter arrangements with VEEV.
A spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia said it “urges pharmacists to be sceptical of any commercial offer from big tobacco”.
“There are currently no nicotine vaping products registered on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods and no company should be advertising unregulated products to Australian healthcare professionals,” the spokesperson said.
The chair of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) smoking cessation advisory group, Nick Zwar, said GPs “would want to know if it was a product that was owned by a tobacco company”.
“I don’t think many doctors would want to be in any way linked to the tobacco industry,” he told the RACGP publication, newsGP, adding that tobacco companies “have historically sought to market nicotine-containing products, including combustible tobacco, to maximise profit at huge cost to human health and economies”.
Liber Pharmaceuticals supplies retail pharmacy networks across Australia with nicotine vaping products. Its chief executive, Richard Lee, confirmed he was aware of a number of pharmacies that had signed up to the VEEV deal.
He acknowledged Liber is a competitor with an interest in maintaining its markets, but said: “Our view is that medicine should be distributed through national wholesalers, because that provides comfort to the doctors and the pharmacies that these products are being treated as medicines, as they should be.
“Anybody can present a script anywhere, whereas under the Philip Morris arrangement people will have to present a script at a pharmacy that has done a deal with Philip Morris to get that product.”
In May, the federal health minister, Mark Butler, announced that the government will ban the importation of nonprescription vaping products – including those that do not contain nicotine. Minimum quality standards for vapes are also being introduced, including restricting flavours, colours and other ingredients.
Vape products will require pharmaceutical-like packaging, and the allowed nicotine concentrations and volumes will be reduced. All single-use, disposable vapes are being banned.
A Philip Morris International spokesman told Guardian Australia; “We have always been open and transparent about the fact we will work within whatever legal and regulatory framework exists for these products in Australia”.
“This is in stark contrast to dozens of other vaping companies who are providing their product via the black market,” he said.
