Vikki Campion: Vaping helps people quit but government doesn’t care
According to the government, a nicotine patch is OK, gum is OK, a cigarette is OK — but vapes are not. Vaping is helping people quit smoking but the government, which makes far more money from smokers than tobacco companies, is making it difficult, Vikki Campion writes.
Opinion
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My first cigarette was over an Atherton creek full of shopping trolleys on arvo break from the Woollies deli, my stockings wet with dishwater and flecked with chunks of meat. Yet, here was my freedom, wrapped in 7cm of filtered paper.
Smoking was big hair, fast cars, Madonna and like 23 per cent of remote people and 21 per cent of the lowest socio-economic bracket who smoke today, it was a path I was destined to travel.
I spent the next 18 years “quitting”.
Gum, patches, retreats, self-help books which encouraged you to smoke all your cigarettes at once, which I did and would immediately buy another packet.
They taste awful, stink, stain teeth, kill you — and I absolutely loved them. I was a $10,000 a year, pack a day smoker.
Every New Year’s resolution for 18 years was the same, but somehow, like most smokers who repeatedly try to quit, I always found a cigarette on my lips.
For 520,000 Australians, the only way they have broken free of this addiction — which kills 21,000 Aussies every year — is to vape nicotine.
Next Wednesday, the Therapeutic Goods Administration will hand down draft guidelines and federal coalition MPs expect those to classify it as a drug of abuse, illegal without a script, and easier to prosecute possession — effectively banning it on the basis that it is classified as a dangerous poison.
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The TGA plan to stop smoking is instead to have low-risk nicotine liquid, prescribed by doctors and issued at pharmacies, but it is quite happy for cigarettes, the deadly form of nicotine, to be available at every service station, grocery store and pub, endorsed by a happily taxing government for anyone with stained fingers or a fake ID, or both.
The TGA, (which should hand this whole deck to the ACCC, which can actually set standards for consumer safety) believes vaping is a pathway to smoking. Well, it might be a goat track in, but it’s definitely a super-highway out.
It’s not glamorous. Audrey Hepburn didn’t suck back on a nicotine nebuliser outside Tiffany’s.
It should be outside the remit of government to decide people’s access to nicotine on the basis they deem it immoral. A patch is OK, a gum is OK, a cigarette is OK — but a vaporiser is not. Steps in this direction are steps towards the sort of governments people run to Australia to escape.
Not one other country requires a prescription for nicotine liquid for vaping. Quite the opposite. Every other western democracy has legalised it, and in the UK, where the Royal Society of Public Health says it’s no more harmful than caffeine, they are debating subsidising it as a quit-smoking aid.
The founding chairman of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, Dr Colin Mendelsohn — who has been helping people get off the smokes for 35 years and is on the committee for developing Australia’s smoking guidelines — has just eight doctors in Australia willing to prescribe it, and zero pharmacists who want to dispense it.
A recent survey of 6500 vapers by Legalise Vaping Australia shows 42 per cent will return to smoking and 37 per cent will go on the black market if nicotine imports are banned.
The loser in this plan is the vaper who returns to being a smoker, and the winner is the government which makes far more money from smokers than tobacco companies — about $17bn a year — enough to build NorthConnex four times.
We have the dearest cigarettes in the world — with excise the largest portion of the cost — and it’s our poorest people paying for it.
It’s not the affluent at the cigarette counter, but the pensioners chained to the cheapest roll-your-own smokes.
While the NSW Liberals sulked about the Nationals standing up for their constituents this week, it was Nationals Upper Hunter MP Michael Johnsen who was getting on with the job, at parliamentary counsel to draft legislation to take nicotine liquid off the poisons list in NSW for the purposes of e-cigarettes.
This is the chance for politicians to prove how nimble governments can be as regulators.
Make it a decision of cabinet, not an ideological bureaucrat at arm’s-length of government, because no one in the voting booth is going to remember the edicts of the TGA — but they will look down at their stained fingers and remember when they started smoking again.
Real freedom is not taking smoking up, but getting off it.
Vaping helps people quit — don’t make it harder for them.