With the Federal Government’s tough vaping legislation now subject to a Senate committee inquiry, VicHealth has unveiled a new anti-vaping campaign featuring warning labels created by more than 500 young people trying to get their peers to quit or avoid e-cigarettes.
Marie McInerney writes:
‘Just because your mate does it doesn’t mean you have to as well.’ ‘Had two hits of my friends’ vapes and I’ve been hooked for five years.’ ‘I would go back and never start vaping if I could.’
These are some of the messages developed by more than 500 young people across Australia as part of a VicHealth-backed campaign urging their peers to quit or avoid e-cigarettes and to press the Australian Parliament to pass strong anti-vaping legislation.
VicHealth said the warning labels and banners, “vividly depicting the true dangers lurking within these toxic products”, have been created as part of UNCLOUD, a peer-reviewed, evidence-based initiative that includes a platform for young Australians to warn each other about vapes.
One of VicHealth’s young ambassadors, Eloise, has become involved in the campaign out of deep concern at how prevalent vaping is in Victorian high schools – “you’ll see them in every second student’s pencil case” – and how much it is now being taken up by primary school children too.
Warning that young people have been fooled into thinking vaping is safe, she wants to “help raise awareness that this is not a candy or lolly alternative to cigarettes,” she told Croakey.
Rallying cry
The Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Bill 2024 is the latest in a series of Federal Government initiatives aiming to dramatically reduce access to vaping, particularly for young people.
The legislation would ban the importation, manufacture, supply, and commercial possession of disposable single use and non-therapeutic vapes, making them only available by prescription.
Critics have said it risks fuelling a black market in vaping products. Both the Greens and Liberal and National parties, who could scuttle the proposed new laws in the Senate, have raised a range of concerns, moving to refer the legislation to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry, to report by 8 May 2024.
Speaking on the sidelines of the World Health Summit Regional Meeting in Naarm/Melbourne this week, VicHealth CEO Dr Sandro Demaio issued a rallying cry to Senators.
“There is no more urgent health issue than the resurgence of Big Tobacco over the last few years as they push e-cigarettes to a new generation, hell bent on getting young Australians and young people across our region addicted to nicotine,” he said.
Urging politicians to “put politics aside and put the health of young people first”, Demaio sought to counter industry claims that vapes are a critical quit smoking tool, saying 18-24 year olds are the single biggest user group.
“So it’s not as though your 65-year-old truckies who have been smoking for 40 years who are using Froot Loops and Milk flavoured e-cigarettes with a unicorn on the packet [to try to quit],” he said.
The tobacco industry “is very clearly going after young people” and had weaponised their data, using social media spaces to make vaping products look alluring, fuelling an unregulated market where they are sold “out the back of a Camry opposite a primary school”, Demaio said.
One of the strong messages VicHealth had received, he said, was that young people don’t understand the health risks of vaping.
That’s why, together with QuitVic and the Cancer Council Victoria, VicHealth last year launched Australia’s largest and Victoria’s first anti-vaping mass media campaign and was now launching this campaign, empowering young people to “warn each other of the health harms”.
“We know that young people ultimately listen to young people, they listen to their friends, their classmates, their colleagues, and that’s where they get health information.”
Call for stronger Asia Pacific action
The concern is not confined to Australian shores.
Earlier at the Summit, Vichealth hosted a closed door Asian Pacific roundtable on vaping, attended by Assistant Health Minister Ged Kearney, Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, World Health Organization Regional Director for the Western Pacific, Palau’s Health Minister Gaafar Uherbelau, Tonga Health CEO Ofeina Filimoehala, and other regional representatives.
Piukala also issued a rallying cry at the meeting, urging policymakers and public health advocates in the Western Pacific Region to intensify their efforts to control e-cigarettes in conjunction with a comprehensive approach to tobacco control.
In 2019, member states had endorsed a ten year action plan for tobacco control in 2019, which included a commitment to ban or regulate e-cigarettes but that vision had lagged, according to a statement released later.
Currently, only six of the 27 member states had banned sales of e-cigarettes while 11 had introduced regulations but many needed them to be strengthened. In the meantime, tobacco and related industries had exponentially grown their market.
“While the circumstances and obstacles vary across different regions, we all share one goal and need to work together, utilising the resources from each of us to protect our youth from these addictive and harmful products,” he said.
The regional push comes amidst a mixed bag of global action on tobacco and e-cigarette controls. The conservative United Kingdom government is taking bold action to effectively create a “smoke free generation” by increasing the legal age for cigarette sales (currently 18) by a year each year from 2027.
This could spur further action in Australia, explained tobacco control expert Associate Professor Becky Freeman, noting that the National Tobacco Strategy also commits to “consider the feasibility of raising the minimum age of purchase of tobacco products and monitor international developments on this matter”.
However, politics could still prevent such a move, as has happened in Aotearoa New Zealand, which was poised to be the first country to implement such a law in July 2024. Along with many other worrying acts undermining public health, the incoming conservative government recently repealed it, together with other public health measures that were set to reduce the number of tobacco retail outlets and to reduce nicotine in cigarettes.
“Undue tobacco industry interference and influence is viewed by public health experts as the primary factor in overturning these laws,” Freeman wrote, warning that, just as when Australia became the first country to implement tobacco plain packaging laws in 2012, the UK will need to be vigilant in pushing back against these same powerful commercial interests.
Vandalism
The New Zealand Government’s decision to repeal the Smokefree Act has been described as an act of “public health vandalism” by Australia tobacco control experts in this week’s MJAInsight.
They wrote that the legislation was the result of “decades of Māori leadership and the work of generations of tobacco-control researchers and advocates in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally”.
“Such a decision highlights how political short-termism and a lack of holistic thinking by governments can impede public health progress to the detriment of the health and economic wellbeing of the population, they said.
They calculated that what taxpayers could collect in tobacco taxes — the rationale for the government scrapping the laws — was greatly outweighed by the costs of tobacco on health and wellbeing, particularly for Māori people.
Support and misgivings
There is widespread support for the Federal Government’s vaping legislation from the health sector, including from the Australian Medical Association, Royal Australian College of General Practitionerss, Cancer Council, Australian Council on Smoking & Health (ACOSH), the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand, and the Public Health Association of Australia.
Last week, federal, state and territory health ministers issued a joint communique on vaping, saying vapes had been “sold to governments and communities around the world as a therapeutic good”, to help hardened smokers “kick the habit”, but it was now clear they were being used “to recruit a new generation to nicotine addiction”.
They cited data that one in six high school students and one in four young Australians aged between 18 and 24 are vaping. The Federal Government recently said that vapes have become the number one behavioural issue in many schools and that studies have shown that nine out of 10 vape shops are within walking distance of schools.
“Australian Health Ministers are not going to stand by and let our kids get hooked on nicotine,” the communique said. It was entirely appropriate, if vapes are therapeutic goods, for them to be available only by prescription, “instead of allowing them to be sold alongside chocolate bars in convenience stores, often down the road from schools”.
The Greens say they will be looking, in the Senate inquiry, at the practicalities of the prescription model, to “ensure that no one is incentivised to return to cigarette smoking and that people can get support when they need it”.
Declaring that “the prohibition of drugs has failed”, Senator Jordon Steele-John said the Greens are concerned about “the vague provisions around acceptable personal quantities, and how the provisions for prosecution would apply in practice”.
“We need a carefully regulated scheme that focuses on public health outcomes, reducing harm and minimising use,” he said in a statement.
Federal Liberal frontbencher Angie Bell said the Opposition knows that current vaping laws are “not doing the job” but it wants to have a much closer look at the legislation, including what has happened to plans for a Vaping Commissioner and how Border Force will be funded to detect illegal vapes.
“So we have a few questions…but of course vaping is doing harm to young people and we’d like to see more done,” she told ABC TV.
Croakey has asked for more detail from the Greens and the Federal Opposition on what changes they might seek, and will update this article with any responses.
Declaration from Croakey: This article was funded as part of VicHeath’s ‘Health Equity Champion’ membership of the Croakey Health Media funding consortium. VicHealth identified the topic; Croakey had editorial control over the research, writing and publication of the article.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on vaping
