State health ministers to ask for crackdown on vaping products at the border

State health ministers will this week push the federal government to crack down on illicit vaping imports after research found e-cigarettes are serving as a gateway to smoking cigarettes.

While laws spearheaded by former Coalition health minister Greg Hunt made it illegal to import liquid nicotine as a smoking cessation aid without a doctor’s prescription, the products are widely available in Australia.

The Cancer Council says state and federal governments must act together to crack down on illegal vaping.Credit: James Brickwood

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said vaping had long been “an issue of concern” and he looked forward to a collaborative discussion about how to tackle its harms at a health ministers’ meeting on Thursday.

“I believe the scientific evidence that vaping is not good for our health, but the challenge is how it can best be managed when many in the community think, erroneously, that it is safe,” Hazzard told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Leading tobacco control expert Libby Jardine, chair of Cancer Council’s Tobacco Issues Committee, said youth vaping in Australia was “becoming an epidemic”.

“The federal government needs to do more to stop unlawful nicotine e-cigarette imports at the border,” Jardine said.

Hazzard and former Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley – who resigned on Friday and will be replaced in the portfolio by Mary-Anne Thomas on Monday – have been pushing since last year for a “national approach” to vaping, including strong enforcement by the Australian Border Force.

While enforcing laws against selling vaping devices to children is a state responsibility, the importation ban can only be enforced by the Commonwealth.

Jardine said states and territories need to shut down unlawful retail sales in their jurisdictions.

“And then all governments need to work together to abolish the so-called non-nicotine e-cigarettes, which are harming children and hampering the legal control of nicotine products.”

Negotiations over the Draft National Tobacco Strategy 2022-2030, which includes a priority to “strengthen regulations for novel and emerging products” such as e-cigarettes, have stalled after state and federal governments failed to agree on a joint approach.

Figures provided to the Senate show that, between the liquid nicotine import ban starting last October and an Estimates hearing in February, Border Force seized just 63 consignments containing the restricted substance.

Almost half a million Australian adults use e-cigarettes and almost two million have tried them, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data collected in 2020-21.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said he was “seeking urgent advice about why the National Tobacco Strategy has not been finalised and options for future advice” after the National Health and Medical Research Council released new advice on e-cigarettes last week.

The minister said the updated advice, which warned vapes contained potentially harmful chemicals and toxins and had a “gateway effect” on youth who had never smoked, raised “very serious concerns about the risks this novel technology poses to public health, particularly to young Australians”.

“Labor has a proud history of implementing world-leading anti-smoking policies, including plain-packaging laws, which has seen a steep reduction in tobacco consumption since 2012,” Butler said.

ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the territory government “strongly supports action to reduce the harm associated with e-cigarettes and I look forward to this discussion with my colleagues”.

“The National Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health’s review of global evidence makes it clear that e-cigarettes cause harm and risk introducing a new generation to smoking,” Stephen-Smith said.

Western Australian Health Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson will also back stronger federal enforcement at Thursday’s meeting, a spokeswoman confirmed.

Chief medical officer Paul Kelly last week said vaping was a major health crisis endangering the nation’s youth, and that one in five people aged 18 to 24 who have never smoked, reported having tried e-cigarettes.

NHMRC chief executive Professor Anne Kelso said vaping had “multiple levels of harm” for young people including a “gateway effect, that it leads people on to feel familiar with smoking, and then to think of taking up tobacco cigarettes”.

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