Last year, Australian Federal Minister of Health Greg Hunt announced a new measure to ban the import of e-cigarette liquids containing nicotine. A few months later, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) announced their final decision on this measure, "Importing nicotine e-cigarettes and liquid nicotine for e-cigarettes requires a doctor’s prescription."

For this reason, from October 1st, e-cigarette users in Australia can only purchase e-cigarette products from pharmacies through prescriptions. Although retailers in neighboring New Zealand and most other countries are able to sell nicotine products over the counter, anyone found to have violated Australia’s stringent regulations will face huge fines and, in some cases, even imprisonment.

600,000 Australian e-cigarette users can now switch back to smoking. The National Drug Strategy Family Survey just reported that although more than 2.5 million Australians are still smoking, the number of e-cigarette users has climbed from 240,000 in 2016 to 520,000 in 2019.

This means that if the number of e-cigarette users in Australia increases steadily, there may currently be as many as 600,000 e-cigarette users, and they are now more likely to switch back to smoking. To this end, well-known tobacco control experts Alex Woodak and Colin Mendelsohn published an article in The Sydney Morning HerALD, saying that the nicotine ban will Backfired.

"Currently, only a very small number of people have prescriptions that need them. Most nicotine supplies are imported without a prescription or purchased from the black market. If compliance with the new arrangements is poor, some people will re-smoker, while others People will buy supplies from the black market. Neither is a good result."

Australia has adopted the wrong approach. In a recent interview with ABC, Vodaq explained how Australia has taken the wrong approach to safer alternatives to nicotine, causing it to lag behind other countries in smoking rates instead of making progress. . Taking Norway as an example, experts said that although the two countries have similar strict tobacco regulations, Norway has achieved success in reducing smoking rates, while Australia has not.

Both countries ban smoking in public places and the marketing of any tobacco products. Both countries have introduced plain packaging requirements for tobacco products, if any, Australia first introduced it in 2012, followed by Norway in 2018.

Although the smoking rate in these two countries has decreased significantly between 2001 and 2018, the proportion of daily smokers in Australia has dropped from 22% to 14%, while the smoking rate in Norway was 30% at baseline. But it has dropped to 12%. The driving factor behind Norway’s success? Support snuff as a safer alternative to nicotine, while in Australia, snuff and other forms of smokeless oral tobacco are still illegal.

The impact of safer nicotine substitutes. The new data also shows that although the decline in the number of daily smokers between 16-24 years old in both countries remained on the same trajectory until around 2007, in Australia, this pattern has finally reached The plateau period has accelerated in Norway.

As an advocate of reducing the harm of drugs, Wodak has long expressed the need to adopt the same approach to smoking. One of his strengths in the ABC interview is that "most smokers have lower incomes." Therefore, among other things, the pricing of safer nicotine alternatives should correspond to their risks to encourage smokers to switch to them.

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