A leading tobacco control expert from University College London, has taken aim at Australia’s new vape laws - passed by the Senate last week - which limit the sales of vaping products to pharmacies only.
Dr Sharon Cox, a Senior Research Fellow at UCL who is affiliated with Cancer Research UK, writes in the Journal Addiction that “Australia's e-cigarette policy is failing to deliver equitable and effective public health policy”.
Con - who is known for research on smoking and smoking cessation among the most disadvantaged in society and the homeless - focuses on the impact that the Australian experiment will have on under-represented and disadvantaged groups, which have the highest smoking rates.
“We now have several systematic reviews that support the role of nicotine containing e-cigarettes for cessation and a growing number of studies showing the beneficial health effects when compared with smoking” argues Cox. “Even if some uncertainty remains on longer term health effects, to date, we know that e-cigarettes are a viable evidence-based option as a smoking cessation aid and should be available to people who need them”.
What Cox believes should be the objective of policy towards vaping - ensuring that they are available to the people who need them to quit - will be lost in the prescription-only model adopted down under. That means allowing their sale in general retail, with restrictions, just as cigarettes are and have been for decades.
This - she argues - will help smokers distinguish between vapes and more “traditional” stop smoking aids like gum and patches, which are already heavily medicalised and are often associated with many failed quit attempts by smokers.
Cox then zeroes in on the effects of pushing vapes onto the black market, which will have a disproportionate effect on disadvantaged communities.
Most Australian vapers access their products without a prescription, and therefore illegally, says Cox; and this has undesirable consequences.
“[P]ushing people into a system of illegal acquisition and consumption, with no product control, will most likely disadvantage those who already are disadvantaged. Historically it is those who are poorer who feel the weight of the criminal justice system, because they lack access to adaptative social determinants to support them [15]. Put simply, by making access to e-cigarettes arduous and discouraging, it feeds into the system of determinants that maintain people in a position of inequality.”
“[H]olding back safer products while people keep accessing cigarettes are not a means that can be justified”, concludes Cox, “[d]oing so contradicts the mission to improve the health of the public”.
New Australian legislation, which its sponsors in the Australian Labor Party have labelled as “world leading” will restrict the sale of vapes to pharmacies. However, it stops short of requiring them to be prescribed by a doctor, as Labor initially wanted, in order to secure the support of the Australian Green Party in the Senate. The policy comes into force today.
