Quitting smoking made me a criminal

WITH one choice, Joe Hildebrand added 10 years to his life - and became a criminal. By writing this article he’s now a crime lord.

WHEN I quit smoking last year, I got a message from Associate Professor Colin Mendelsohn from the School of Public Health at the University of NSW.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve just added almost 10 years to your life.”

He then added: “You’re also now a criminal.”

Today the Australian Government will decide whether I will remain one, and whether 2.6 million other Australians will get the chance to potentially save their lives.

My crime was to quit the only way I knew I could: By replacing a real cigarette with an e-cigarette that delivered the nicotine without virtually all of the stuff that actually kills you.

That practice is currently illegal. The Therapeutic Goods Administration will announce today whether that should change or not.

I had been a smoker for 25 years. I started when I was 15 because I wanted to be cool. Smoking was so much a part of my identity that my nickname became “Smokin’ Joe”. I couldn’t think without it, couldn’t drink without it, couldn’t even walk or talk without it.

I come from a family of alcoholics and binge eaters and lunatics. I have always had a highly addictive personality and am deeply obsessive-compulsive. If I don’t spray my armpits a number of times that is exactly divisible by four I cannot leave the house.

In the past I have taken just about every drug under the sun but over the years I managed to reduce my intake to the legal ones — alcohol and tobacco. In other words I’m bad, but I’m not as bad as I used to be.

I’m also now a husband and father and I don’t want to live fast and die young anymore. I want to live slow and die old.

Statistically speaking, if you quit smoking at 35 your body can recover to full health. Every year after that you lose three months of life. And so after turning 40 I was already eating into my allotted time on earth.

But despite quitting almost every other vice in my life I had never attempted to give up tobacco. Life without cigarettes was simply unimaginable. It was like suggesting I should quit my hands.

“Dammit,” I muttered through a cloud of smoke one night. “They can put a man on the moon but they can’t invent a cigarette that doesn’t kill you.”

One can kill you and is legal. The other could potentially add years to your life, but is illegal.

And that’s when I realised: They had.

That moment, for the first time in 25 years, I decided to quit smoking. I went online and looked for a nicotine delivery device that most resembled a cigarette and bought it. Instantly I became a criminal.

Because here is the thing that will make your blood boil and your lungs burst: In Australia you can walk into any corner store or supermarket and buy a product that will in all probability kill you.

And yet it is illegal to purchase a product specifically designed to save you from that death.

This is the nanny state gone insane. And other countries know it. In the UK, where e-cigarettes are perfectly legal and even encouraged, the peak health body Public Health England recently concluded that “using EC (electronic cigarettes) is around 95 per cent safer than smoking” and that “smokers who have tried other methods of quitting without success could be encouraged to try e-cigarettes”.

Indeed, a European Union study found an estimated 6.1 million people had quit by using e-cigarettes, while the number of non-smokers who tried them was only 1.3 per cent and the number who used them daily was less than 0.1 per cent.

And the UK Royal College of Physicians recommended that “in the interests of public health, it is important to promote the use of e-cigarettes … as widely as possible as a substitute for smoking”.

A decision on e-cigarettes is expected today.

Even in the US, the nation that came up with Prohibition, e-cigarettes are legal. While the US Surgeon-General has raised concerns about young people taking it up, Reuters reported at the same time: “Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that as e-cigarette use has risen among young people, smoking rates have gone down.”

Meanwhile Canada and New Zealand are now pretty much just quibbling over regulation.

“We know that there is some evidence to suggest that the use of vaping products can be used as a harm-reduction tool for people who are current smokers,” Canadian Health Minister Jane Philpott said last year.

Yet in Australia it is a crime to buy or use any vapour device with nicotine in it — the nature of the crime depending on the state.

And if you think the policy coming from the White House right now is confusing, try checking out Australian laws on e-cigarettes. They read like someone’s smoking more than tobacco.

For example in NSW it is legal to buy e-cigarettes but illegal to buy nicotine. However it is legal to use nicotine in your e-cigarette. In WA it is illegal to buy e-cigarettes but legal to use them. However it is illegal to buy nicotine — although legal to import it.

In fact even me writing this article is technically illegal. The NSW Public Health (Tobacco) Act 2008 — Section 15a prohibits any “writing, or any still or moving picture, sign, symbol or other visual image or message or audible message, or a combination of two or more of them, that gives publicity to, or otherwise promotes or is intended to promote the purchase or use of an e-cigarette”.

I’m not just a criminal, I’m a crime lord.

The problem is that the Australian public health establishment — God bless its cotton socks — is crippled by caution. The peak bodies are worried there is still insufficient evidence about the potential harm of e-cigarettes. They are waiting for more research. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

They are also waiting for the TGA’s decision today on whether nicotine should be allowed in e-cigarettes in Australia.

These are very smart people and of course they have good intentions. But sometimes you can be too smart by half and we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

The giant gaping chasm of logic at the heart of these arguments is that the impact of nicotine in e-cigarettes is constantly measured against non-smokers instead of those already busily killing themselves with the real deal — namely the very people they are intended for.

Because even if the worst is true about e-cigarettes they still only cause one-twentieth of the harm of actual cigarettes — WHICH ARE AVAILABLE IN EVERY CONVENIENCE STORE IN THE COUNTRY.

You can be as dumb as a box of hammers and still know that doesn’t add up.

And while it might be better if everyone just quit nicotine altogether we also know that 2.6 million Australian adults are smokers. And we know that two-thirds of them will be killed by the habit.

That’s more than 1.7 million people who are headed for an early death while the authorities um and ah.

And yes, maybe it’s their choice to smoke. Just like it was my choice to start when I was a 15-year-old nerd at Dandenong High School. You only had to look at my haircut to know I wasn’t making particularly good decisions in 1991.

But we also know that you are far more likely to smoke if you’re poor, if you have mental health issues, if you have substance abuse issues and if you are indigenous. And I’ve been at least three of those things over the years.

Of course now that I’m a rich criminal I don’t have to worry. But are these really the people we want to moralise to, shame and let die while we’re arguing over whether something that could save their lives is pristine enough?

This is the danger of policymaking based on a perfect ideal instead of an imperfect world. The problem with utopia is that you never quite get there.

Indeed, for all the eminent experts deciding whether e-cigarettes should be banned you have to wonder if they’ve consulted the most qualified expert of all: An actual smoker.

Certainly every smoker I’ve met since starting e-cigarettes has been desperate to know how to get them so they can quit too and every vaper I’ve met is a reformed smoker. And granted, that’s not a scientific study. It’s just real life.

But Dr Mendelsohn is one of 40 Australian and international experts who have called on the TGA to focus on real life and legalise a quitting aid that might just make real cigarettes redundant.

“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people out there,” he told me yesterday. “They’re fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and we know two out of three of them will die prematurely from smoking.

“It’s not just a policy issue — people’s lives are at stake.”

We will see today whether the government puts those lives ahead of ideology or whether they just end up protecting people to death.

As for me, I haven’t had a cigarette in six months. And if that’s a crime, then it’s one worth living for.

UPDATE: Shortly after midday the TGA released its decision and Dr Mendelsohn sent me another message. “Hi Joe,” he said. “You are still a criminal.”