The Australian government wants to crack down on e-cigarette use in one of the country’s broadest tobacco control moves in recent years to “reduce smoking and end e-cigarette use”. said.
The proposal, announced Tuesday, would ban all single-use single-use e-cigarettes. Stop importing non-prescription vape. “Pharmaceutical-like packaging” is required. Reduce concentration and amount of nicotine; limit certain flavors, colors and ingredients.
The federal government is also working with states and territories to end the sale of e-cigarettes in convenience stores and other retail outlets, while also “improving the availability of prescriptions for legal therapeutic use” for health seniors. Ministry of Care said. said in a statement.
Nicotine vape is currently only available by prescription in Australia, but the black market is thriving, especially among young people. While the outlines of the proposal are still tentative, Health Minister Mark Butler said its long-term intentions were clear.
“We hope to return to what e-cigarettes were said to be invented for: therapeutic products to help long-term smokers quit,” Butler said Tuesday in a speech at the National Press Club of Australia. “This was promised to be the path to quitting smoking, not the path to smoking. That’s what it became. That’s what was shamelessly marketed and presented.”
In particular, Butler said the government “wants to eradicate the idea that this is an entertainment product,” but especially an entertainment product for our children.
“Knocking out that market is what I’m aiming for,” he said.
Many health regulators, including the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, believe that e-cigarettes are generally beneficial because they offer adult smokers an alternative to traditional cigarettes that coat their lungs with tar. Regulators do not account for young people becoming addicted to nicotine after becoming addicted to the fruity flavors of e-cigarettes, nor for the mysterious and life-threatening e-cigarette-related illness that plagues many young users. In recent years, the FDA has launched its own crackdown.
Butler said the Australian government had no plans to ban smoking or phase out smoking by year of birth. was banned for life.
In a statement, the government called the strategy a “new national framework” to reduce daily smoking rates across Australia.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers will present the Commonwealth’s annual operating budget to Parliament on May 9. This budget includes his A$737 million (approximately $492 million) for funding the initiative.
The budget calls for a 5% annual tobacco tax increase from 1 September, generating an additional A$3.3 billion (about $2.2 billion) in revenue over four years. Butler said Tuesday that the government will invest most of its money in the country’s health care system. This includes a new National Lung Cancer Screening Programme, a cancer treatment service for Indigenous groups and a program to reduce e-cigarettes and smoking among First Nation Australians.
But Butler said the focus of the initiative was to “reduce major health risks to Australia’s youngest generation”.
“We know this as parents or as aunts and uncles interacting with young students. Especially during Covid, it’s thriving,” he said. We will have to close the industry, a market that has been allowed to grow even though it was not.”
But Nicole Lee, an adjunct professor at Curtin University’s National Institute of Medicine, said she was skeptical that this kind of approach would impact the black market that regulators wanted. A shortage of primary care physicians means that people seeking e-cigarette prescriptions are less likely to get one, adding further stress to an already explosive black market.
“We want to reduce access and we want people to be able to use it to quit smoking,” she said. will thrive and young people will have access, not less access.”
Enso contributed to the report.
