From the outside, the stores look like “every child’s dream”, says University of Sydney tobacco control expert Prof Becky Freeman.
Throughout Australia, an increasing number of stores are opening, displaying colourful, often international lolly brands in their windows, including across the road from schools. Inside the stores, e-cigarettes and vapes are readily available in similarly attractive packaging and flavours to sweets and ice-cream – bubble gum, watermelon and exotic lime.
Freeman says it is a marketing tactic mastered by the tobacco industry.
“There used to be huge walls of tobacco products in shops and the packages were the same colours as the chocolate and lolly wrappings on the sweets being sold alongside them,” Freeman says. “Appealing to young people has always been the core business of these harmful industries.”
Dual vape-lolly shops are opening despite the health minister, Mark Butler, announcing in May that reforms will be introduced to ban the import of nicotine and non-nicotine vapes and vape products, with only licensed pharmacists permitted to import and sell them to people with a prescription from their GP.
Once the rules come into effect, vape stores will be forced to close, and other retailers will have to get rid of all vape products. But no start date has been set, and in the meantime, Freeman says, stores selling vape products continue to open seemingly undeterred, some of them metres from schools.
Regulations requiring vaping products to come with warning labels, in restricted flavours, and in plain pharmaceutical packaging are also yet to take effect.
The Melbourne GP Dr Stuart Emmerson says he is “dismayed” to see a new candy store, which also sells vapes, open directly opposite a primary school.
“The location is predatory and should be illegal,” he says. “There will inevitably be underage vulnerable children accessing vapes and commencing the unhealthy journey to nicotine dependency. This is a moral issue that has serious negative consequences for society.”
There is no specific requirement in New South Wales or Victoria to inform local councils of the intent to sell tobacco or smoking-related products.
“It makes it difficult to know how many more vape stores are opening in some states, where you don’t need a licence to sell them,” Freeman says.
“But we can see with our own eyes these stores are popping up everywhere. And you have to think they’re doing so because they’re convinced the lobbying efforts of the vaping and tobacco industries will work and they will win and stop these reforms from taking effect. That would be the worst-case scenario … it will mean we have learned nothing from tobacco control, and another highly addictive product would be treated like milk, bread and cheese.”
She wants Butler to announce an implementation date for the sweeping reforms first announced in May to reiterate the message that the vaping industry will be stamped out.
“We need clarification on when it’s coming, because in the meantime, young people are still vaping and telling us it’s easy to get vapes.”
Earlier in September, the federal health minister criticised the proliferation of vape stores for “increasingly opening in a very deliberate way just down the road from schools, because they realise that is their target consumers”. Parents have written to Guardian Australia describing new vape stores opening while advertising international sweets.
“A vape shop is open directly beside the school crossing,” a parent whose children attend the primary school says.
“It has been named a candy shop and has lollies prominently displayed in the window. The parent community is furious about the location of the shop and the obvious enticement to little children to head in there. Many high school kids also get off the bus in that location.”
Kate Greening, who lives in Brisbane, says a vape store recently opened within 150 metres of the local state school and 950 metres of the local state high school.
“It is very common for older siblings to have to walk directly past the store to meet up with younger brothers and sisters [who] attend the state school at the beginning and end of the school day,” Greening says.
“It was clear that they were trying to target kids as there is another tobacco and lotto store just down the other end of [the road] which has been open for years. Another store was clearly not needed for adults in the area.”
She wants the government to “act quick on enforcing any new legislation”.
The NSW health minister, Ryan Park, says cracking down on retailers promoting products to children is a priority, while national reforms that will see the products seized at the international border are finalised.
“As a father of two young kids, I share the concerns about vaping and how easy it is for young people to become hooked,” he says.
Earlier in the week, the premier, Chris Minns, said in the meantime there was only so much the state government could do, given the scale of product coming in.
“The idea that you’re selling watermelon, pineapple and bubblegum [vapes] for kids to have access to that doesn’t contain nicotine is a joke and everybody knows it’s a joke,” he said. “Every street corner is selling nicotine to children.”
Small towns are also being affected. Philip Roper is a resident of a town north-east of Melbourne, where “in the last six months, two of the many vacant shops have been turned into ‘convenience stores’, which are really vape shops,” he says.
“My 13-year-old wanted to go to one because it sold lollies, but he changed his mind when we pointed out it’s really a vape shop. I suspect [many] of these vape shops are funded by tobacco companies. I don’t see how anyone else would have the cash ready to set them up so quickly and find people to work in them.”
One of the world’s leading advocates for tobacco control who lobbied for cigarette plain packaging, Prof Simon Chapman, says vape stores are asking themselves who their biggest customers are.
“And the answer is young people,” he says.
“There are strategic ways you would think about positioning where you’re going to open up a shop. Near schools is obviously one of them.”
