E-cigarettes: Vape crackdown for Australia: flavour bans, plain packaging and imports crackdown

A massive vape crackdown will be announced in the next couple of weeks as the health minister attempts to curb a ‘new generation of nicotine addicts’.

The regulations will include a ban on flavours, plain packaging similar to cigarettes, and tighter restrictions on imports to tackle illegal smuggling into the country. 

Health Minister Mark Butler said that vapes are clearly marketed to children and slammed the idea that most don’t contain nicotine as ‘utter horse***t’.

He says that e-cigarettes are clearly aimed at children with flavours like bubble gum, and research finding one-in-six high-schoolers say they have have tried vaping.

The full list of regulations will be confirmed in the May budget.

Mr Butler says that e-cigarettes are clearly aimed at children and that it’s ‘horsesh**’ to believe the majority of them don’t contain nicotine

Mr Butler  said he would take strongest possible action to prevent vapes being normalised in schools. 

‘The school authorities are off their brain it’s not just high schools – it’s primary school,’ Mr Butler told news.com.

‘These stores are operating under the fiction that what they’re selling is non-nicotine vapes, and we know that’s utter horse***t,’ 

‘Every time anyone does a random test of these things they’re found to be overwhelmingly nicotine vapes, and you have to ask the question, why wouldn’t someone want to use a vape that didn’t have nicotine in them? 

‘I mean, that’s the whole purpose of them – to get that hit.’

Mr Butler said that he would welcome recommendations from the Therapeutic Goods Administration to help prevent more minors from picking up the habit.

‘The TGA has recommended pharmaceutical packaging. So not these pretty ones with pink unicorns on them. It would be plain flavoured,’ Mr Butler said. 

Currently nicotine vapes can only legally be purchased from a chemist by someone who has a prescription, but an alarming amount of convenience stores and tobacconists sell them over the counter without hesitation. 

Specialty stores are also a staple across the country, with rows of colourful vapes displayed openly upon entry.

‘This is such an insidious product that the tobacco industry has deliberately designed to create a new generation of nicotine addicts,’ he said.

‘It completely explains why under 25s is the only cohort in the population where smoking rates are increasing. That’s exactly what the industry wanted.

‘One-in-70 people in their 50s have vaped. One-in-four people my daughter’s age has vaped.’

New research has shown that people who vape are three times more likely to take up cigarettes.  

Other reports cited by Mr Butler revealed that more than 50 children under the age of four have had been poisoned through nicotine ingestion over the last year. 

Convenience stores openly display colourful vape options and appealing flavours, which are ‘insidiously’ targeting children according to Mr Butler

The extent of the crackdown will be revealed in the budget, and Mr Butler said an equal amount of attention has to be paid to our borders. 

‘We would have to take some action at the border, which Greg Hunt tried to do to his credit, but he then got rolled within I think 10 days by his party room.

‘Because they’re not coming in as shipping containers labelled vapes, they’re coming in, in quite small boxes, which is really where the states and territories come in.’ 

Mr Butler said that a difficulty in tackling the imports was getting the regulatory framework right, which would empower individual states and territories to enforce them. 

‘I think what’s been happening is the Commonwealth has been saying we can’t do anything about the fact that this has just gone nuts because it’s a state and territory policing issue.

‘Then the states and territories say why should we divert resources from catching robbers and murderers into vapes when the borders are just completely open?

‘So we’ve got to take action on the border. States have to take some action around policing and retail arrangements. I think there’s the appetite to do that.’