Banning vaping just makes it harder for smokers to quit

The sale of vapes will now be prohibited and nicotine vape available only on prescription for purchase at a pharmacy. Picture: istock

Another day, another day of government overreach.

This time it comes in the form of a prohibition on vaping. The announcement was made by Health Minister, Mark Butler at the National Press Club on Tuesday. The sale of vapes will now be prohibited and nicotine vape available only on prescription for purchase at a pharmacy.

The best we can say is Minister Butler has been ill-advised and is ill-informed.

Let me count the ways.

Butler said the ban was put in place to protect “our kids”. He claimed the 16–25-year-old age group is the only one where smoking rates are growing. While vaping rates are growing, the rates of smokers in this demographic are, in fact, declining.

Butler said, voice trembling with outrage that vaping is an “insidious product creating a new generation of addicts.” This, too, is not supported by data in Australia or indeed anywhere around the world. Less than one percent of young people who vape weekly or more frequently have never smoked cigarettes. The majority of people who vape are either rusted on smokers or are using vapes to kick the habit.

And finally, Butler summoned the name of that great public health Satan, Big Tobacco, as the purveyors of vaping. Virtually all of the vapes sold in stores either over the counter or under it are unregulated products coming from China.

How did Butler get this so wrong?

It’s been almost a century since cocaine was banned in Australia. If you believe the drivel from Butler or the public health industry on the benefits of prohibition, the drug would have ceased to exist. Surely by now even the word would have been struck from the lexicon or shuffled off to the obscurity of pharmacopeia.

A quick glance at the crime statistics shows simple possession pinches for cocaine are through the roof in our capital cities. Each year brings more. Lives ruined by momentary lapses of judgment.

The manufacture and distribution of cocaine is run by organised criminal syndicates who aren’t just doling out drugs of addiction, they are in the mass murder business. After a century of drug prohibition, they have become an unstoppable force.

Almost all cocaine consumed in Europe arrives courtesy of the Calabrian Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta. To paraphrase La Cosa Nostra accountant Meyer Lansky, the syndicate is bigger than BHP-Billiton. The Calabrian Mafia draws in revenue in excess of Australia’s largest public company.

If more lessons are needed, we could look at Australia’s version of the Volstead Act, six o’clock closing. A hand wringing exercise from Rechabites and assorted wowsers urged governments to treat adults like animals. By the end of World War I, every state and territory had imposed six o’clock closing. This gave rise to a network of sly groggers which in turn built the foundations of organised crime in Australia.

As an aside, when US servicemen began arriving in Australia in 1942, governments fretted over what could be done to keep them entertained. Police and regulators were quietly told to look the other way. Sly groggers and prostitution kingpins were given the green light.

This created systemic corruption that took decades to remove from the New South Wales Police Force.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of 20th Century history can see that prohibition creates crime. Where a demand for a product exists and the supply of that product is restricted from sale by law, a black market will fill the vacuum. This is a certainty of the death and taxes type.

It’s already happening with vaping. The Australian has reported on the ease of purchasing nicotine based vapes. In a confusion of poor regulation, children can buy them. Not just under the counter.

When laws were introduced on vaping by the previous government, a prescription model was created around the regulation of vaping products. That has not changed other than a vague mention by the minister that vapers would not be permitted to doctor shop for prescriptions. Unlike other prescription drugs, the government allowed for the personal importation and sale of non-nicotine-containing vape devices.

Health Minister Mark Butler. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Now they’re banned from sale altogether. The same mindset that prevailed a century ago would now have us believe that this problem is solved and the threat to “our kids” has passed in a flurry of feel-good announcements.

Not content with strip searching teenagers sniffed down by dogs who have an average false positive rate of 60 percent, the Minns Labor government in NSW is considering installing 40,000 smoke and vape detectors in school toilets, funded by the federal government.

Electronic monitoring of children in toilets. What could possibly go wrong?

The prohibition comes while vaping already has a well established black market network of distribution and sales. Butler’s announcement comes with a $234 million price tag, including $63 million for a public health campaign, presumably of the dreary ‘just say no’ advertising kind. Much of the rest of the money will be spent on enforcement.

It will be left to the states to determine if possessing a vape will become a criminal offence. But if it is prohibited surely legal sanctions of some kind or other will exist. And so we spend millions of dollars effectively criminalising the sale of vaping products.

My experience of vaping has only been positive. I’ve been a smoker for many years. Regrettably, my eldest daughter became a smoker, too. But she kicked her habit by using nicotine-based vapes which she purchased from somewhere or other. Now she does neither.

She forms part of a cohort, clinically assessed, analysed, reported and peer-reviewed that reveals vaping is a pathway that ends nicotine use and addiction for long term smokers. There are other pathways to quitting the dreaded durries, but vaping is one form of quitting that has proven effective. Butler’s announcement makes it more difficult for adult smokers to quit.

Minister Butler’s announcement is not just wrong, it is wrong early and often. Above all it shows this government has a distinct lack of faith in children, a view that they are gormless automatons addicted to self-harm and more broadly in the community that adults should have their lifestyle choices limited at the whim of government.

If the Health Minister thinks the nation’s children are pushovers, he should pass his ministerial duties over to someone who holds them in higher regard. If he believes government is incapable of creating an effective regulatory system around vaping, he should get out of parliament altogether.