Ban on nicotine-containing e-cigarettes overturned amid warning for parents
Nicotine-containing e-cigarettes will be sold with a script in Australia after a ban on the devices was reversed, as shocking photos reveal how the devices are being pushed on teenagers.
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Exclusive: The ban on nicotine-containing e-cigarettes will be overturned and they will be available on prescription from next June under a controversial decision by Australia’s medicines watchdog.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration today issued an interim decision for public discussion that would make the nicotine-containing e-cigarettes available for adults trying to quit smoking.
This is despite Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council ruling there is not enough evidence to support e-cigarettes as a quit smoking aid.
Australian Medical Association president Dr Omar Khorshid said there was inadequate evidence that e-cigarettes helped with smoking cessation.
However, he said by tying e-cigarette use to a doctors prescription the TGA was in effect toughening access to the devices.
If they were prescription only they could now be stopped at the border unless the person importing them could produce a doctor’s prescription, he said.
“It’s almost the same thing as an export ban,”’ he told News Corp.
And he doubted many doctors would prescribe them.
“It would be unethical in my view for doctors to prescribe e-cigarettes to non smokers,” he said.
The Cancer Council of Australia said it strongly opposed e-cigarettes but supported the changes.
By ensuring people who wanted to use them had to visit their doctor to obtain a prescription” it will mean firstly that new people won’t be able to access them and become addicted, and secondly people who are already addicted will be able to work with their doctor to overcome the addiction,” the council said.
It comes as News Corp revealed how easy it is for teens to access nicotine-containing e-cigarettes, even though it is illegal to sell the products in most states.
Students as young as 13 are suffering from severe vomiting, while others are reporting chronic bouts of diarrhoea caused by an alarming spike of vaping in high schools.
Medical experts have revealed some teens are ingesting as much nicotine contained in a packet of cigarettes in just a few hours, with new technology making the smokeless devices undetectable by teachers or parents.
The use of electronic – or e-cigarettes – had soared in the past three years with one in five nonsmokers aged 18 to 24 using the products.
Frequency of use also increased, with 28 per cent of people using them at least monthly up from 10 per cent in 2016, the latest Australian National Drug Strategy Household Survey found
“There’s an old saying that we use, if it’s in society, it’s in your school. So therefore, by definition, if there’s an increasing use of e-cigarettes in the community, then there would be an increasing use of it in schools,’ Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Pierpoint said.
The problem has become so chronic high schools have sent letters home to parents warning about a significant increase in vaping.
Cancer Council CEO Professor Sanchia Aranda said new nicotine salt-type devices that look like brightly coloured USB devices did not even produce a vapour.
Students could be sucking on them in class or even in front of their parents without adults being aware they were vaping, she said.
Sydney mum Jacqueline Woods was distressed to find pictures on social media of her 15-year-old daughter and her friends vaping at a sleepover in her house “there was no smoke, there was no odour’.
“I felt so dumb I didn’t even know it was going on in my own house,” Ms Woods told News Corp.
She had seen photos on social media of girls and boys from all of Sydney’s top private schools vaping she said.
Students were ordering the products on Snapchat and picking it up at local train stations, others were being sold the products by other teenagers in their workplaces, she said.
Ms Woods said she had confronted the owner of a Lane Cove tobacconist after she discovered he had been selling her daughter vapes.
Years of hard won reductions in smoking are being overturned, the Cancer Council, the National Heart Foundation of Australia and the Australian Council on Smoking and Health are warning.
“Promotion of e-cigarette use and dismissal of the risks (in the UK) has led to a 20 per cent use of e-cigarettes in 16 to 24-year-olds and coincided with year-on-year increases in smoking from 8.7 per cent to 14.4 per cent in 16-17 year-olds,” the bodies said.
While it can take decades for health effects of tobacco smoking to become apparent vaping can have more immediate harmful effects, respiratory physician Professor Matthew Peters told News Corp.
“It can cause an acute inflammation of the spongy lung, in some cases the damage is so severe that patients had to be put on high flow oxygen, or even a ventilator. And in some cases, these have progressed to death,” he told News Corp.
In January this year a 15-year-old in Texas died from a vaping associated lung injury after using the devices for only a month.
Earlier this year Health Minister Greg Hunt delayed new laws that would have tightened rules around the importation of e-cigarettes.
Tobacco giant Philip Morris is lobbying the government to embrace e-cigarettes claiming they can help smokers kick the habit.
Electronic cigarettes are battery operated devices that heat a liquid to produce a vapour that users inhale and often contain nicotine.
Members of the public who wish to comment on the decision can do so via the TGA’s consultation hub
Originally published as Ban on nicotine-containing e-cigarettes overturned amid warning for parents