Tobacco expert calls for Australia to completely ban vapes unless they're prescribed by a doctor
Professor Becky Freeman says this would prevent vapes from saturating the market.
Charisa Bossinakis
One of Australia’s leading tobacco experts has called for e-cigarettes to be banned unless they’re prescribed by a doctor to help quit smoking.
University of Sydney Associate Professor Becky Freeman said in a paper published by Public Health Research that retailers, manufacturers, and importers of vaping products had exploited regulations, leading them to saturate the market.
According to Professor Freeman, this has led to a significant increase in young people consuming e-cigarettes.
She claims many manufacturers have misled young people by incorrectly labelling their products by claiming they are nicotine-free.
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Professor Freeman said that a way to curb this issue would be by only distributing vapes that are pharmacy bound.
While she acknowledged that vaping is a ‘very, very valuable as a smoking cessation tool, and we are incredibly supportive of it being used in that way’, doctors are concerned for young people consuming vapes who have never smoked cigarettes.
A study of early high school students in New Zealand found about 30 per cent of daily vapers had never smoked cigarettes.
However, the level of nicotine in most vapes made them highly addictive, as per The Guardian.
“We don’t know the harms of vaping long term … a lot of those harms will not be obvious for us for the next 10 to 20 years,” Professor Freeman said.
Dr Kelly Burrowes, a vaping researcher at the University of Auckland’s bioengineering school, echoed a similar sentiment and suggested doctors should the only ones who can prescribe vapes.
She added that extra measures should be implemented, such as removing vape flavours.
“The Australian model, where it’s prescription only, seems like a really good approach,” she said, as per The Guardian.
According to the American Lung Association, research has shown that E-cigarettes produce several dangerous chemicals, including acetaldehyde, acrolein, and formaldehyde.
These aldehydes can lead to lung disease, as well as cardiovascular disease.
E-cigarettes also contain acrolein, a herbicide primarily used to kill weeds. It can cause acute lung injury and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and may cause asthma and lung cancer.
“It’s clear that there will be negative health effects from vaping, it’s just unclear exactly what those long term effects will be,” Dr Burrows added.
“We should be preventing those people who don’t already smoke from starting vaping.”