Smoke and mirrors: The big money behind Australia’s vaping ban

With a new financial year underway, the Morrison government will request the Governor-General to prohibit the importation of e-cigarettes containing vaporiser nicotine and nicotine-containing refills for e-cigarettes unless on prescription from a doctor.

The G-G can hardly say no.

As of next Wednesday, importing nicotine as a liquid for vaping or in the form of e-cigarettes in one shape or another will be criminalised. It comes with a $220,000 fine.

Even if you ordered a supply of nicotine last week, it will be seized. Force majeur. No refunds payable.

Evan Mullholland, the Director of Communications at the Institute of Public Affairs tweeted yesterday, “I don’t smoke, but I know so many people who have kicked the habit of cigarettes by vaping. It is clearly a safer alternative. Greg Hunt is a decent Minister but as a Liberal Party member of over 10 years I have to say this is the most abhorrent decision I have seen in politics.”

Forget smokers. It’s the Commonwealth that has become gormlessly addicted to nicotine. Australian cigarettes are the most expensive in the world. A pack of 25 cigarettes at the bottom end costs around $32 or $1.25 a stick. Around 80 cents of that is kicked over to the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth pocketed $12.15bn in tobacco excise last year. Budget estimates for the next financial year put the excise grab at $16.9bn and it is projected to stay around $16bn over the forward estimates.

That’s a lot of money. To give it a sense of scale it is just $6bn shy of total Commonwealth spending on Medicare and roughly a quarter of the Commonwealth health budget, paid by one eighth of the population.

Vaping is much cheaper than smoking, not least of all because those who have legitimately imported nicotine products pay no excise to the Commonwealth. It’s a matter of ordering online and paying for the goods, the postage and handling and paying whatever tax is in place in the country they are purchasing from.

The way the law is at present, it is illegal to sell nicotine in liquid form or e-cigarettes in every state and territory.

Vapers have had to turn to the internet and lawfully purchase those products from overseas, often from New Zealand or the United States.

Minister Hunt says that a vaper may continue to import nicotine provided they have a prescription from their GP, approval from the Health Department and have successfully applied for permits to import the product.

There are so many hoops to clamber through, even the most stubborn vapers will give up.

Smoking rates have reduced, but only marginally in the last three years, down from 12.8 per cent of the population 14 or older to 12.2 per cent. Much of that reduction comes from a sharp decline in smoking among the 15-24 age. The plain packaging advocates argue that it is a consequence of their policy but it is impossible to separate the implementation of plain packaging from the sharp, twice annual rises in excise and the rise of vaping.

We have very little data on vapers or users of e-cigarettes. That in itself is a poor reflection on health administrators in this country.

It is estimated there are around 300,000 vapers in the country. What we can only guess at is whether that number also smoke cigarettes, whether they vape as a means to an end of quitting smoking or whether they vape for the simple pleasure of inhaling nicotine and have no intention of quitting.

Similarly, there is very little data on the long-term harm that may come from vaping but a rule of thumb figure is smoking is around twenty times more dangerous. This is supported by the Royal College of Physicians in the UK which concluded, “the hazard to health arising from long-term vapour inhalation from the e-cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed five per cent of the harm from smoking tobacco.”

Unlike vaping, smoking cigarettes includes the inhalation of known carcinogens in tar like butadiene, benzene, aldehydes, and ethylene oxide.

There is no evidence to indicate inhaling second-hand steam (rather than smoke) causes any harm.

What the new prohibition means is that vapers will turn to smoking cigarettes for their nicotine hits. They will turn from a relatively harmless method of consuming nicotine to a far more lethal form and the Commonwealth will be the beneficiary.

Why does the government with the public health industry, including the Australian Medical Association cheering them on, support the banning of nicotine for vaping if one of the clear outcomes will be a hike in cigarette smoking?

The only vaguely rational argument is that nicotine-based vaping or e-cigarettes might be a gateway to smoking, rather than the other way around. There is no evidence to support this. None whatsoever.

Indeed, what we can see is that the 15-24 age demographic has shunned smoking while many choose to vape. Vaping tends to be a young person’s caper. There’s no statistical evidence to indicate that by the time they hit 25 or 30 or 40, they hurl their vaping pods or e-cigarettes in the bin and light up a Marlboro.

It is more a case of people spending their hard-earned on a simple pleasure that comes with a certain risk but they carry on based on that much ignored principle of public policy, informed choice.

Vapers in older age groups tend to do so to get off the coffin nails. What are they going to do as of next Wednesday? Well, we know what they are going to do. They’re going to continue to consume nicotine in the only way available in the Australian marketplace: smoking.

Trust me these people have tried all the methods for quitting. Cold turkey, patches, chewing gums, sprays, tablets. They will need to receive doses of nicotine and the easiest way to do that is to stroll into a supermarket and buy a pack of smokes at the counter.

While the public health industry, those people who frown on the community for spending their money in pursuing the lawful pleasures of smoking, drinking and gambling, are stuck in an ideological warp, it’s difficult to believe the government has any other motive than a smash and grab exercise.

This article was first published at The Australian on 26 June, 2020.

NB: Several hours after it was published and under pressure from Coalition backbenchers, Health Minister Greg Hunt announced the ban on nicotine fluids and e-cigarettes would be postponed for six months.