Action on Smoking and Health NZ's Prof Beaglehole went on tour in Australia. Other NZ public health academics who want to copy Australia might consider a similar trip.
He writes:
What I found was revealing. Legal cigarettes were widely available, although expensive, costing A$40 to A$60 (about $50-$74) for a pack of 20. Yet illicit cigarettes were easy to obtain, starting at A$9 a pack. One shopkeeper even offered some unsolicited business advice: “If you want to get rich, open a tobacco shop and sell cheap cigarettes.”
Then I went looking for vapes. The contrast was striking. Illegal vapes were easy to find. Regulated legal vapes were not. They are available only through pharmacies, which are not required to stock them and most do not.
Smoking and vaping are not the same thing. It is the burning of tobacco and inhalation of smoke, not nicotine, that causes almost all the disease and death caused by smoking. Vaping is not harmless, but the evidence strongly supports it being substantially less harmful than smoking.
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Of course we should continue to protect young people. Age restrictions should be enforced. Marketing should be tightly controlled. Products should be properly regulated.
But we should be just as determined to help people who smoke quit.
Some New Zealand experts have argued that vaping products should be supplied only through pharmacies, as they are in Australia, to reduce youth vaping. But any proposal to make vaping less accessible should confront a simple question: what will people who smoke do instead?
My Australian road trip offered a reminder that public health policies should be judged not only by their intentions but also by their consequences.
For those concerned about youth vaping, there is a very obvious and easy policy move. Selling vapes to those underaged is illegal and draws penalties. Social supply by older friends is unregulated.
The Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act, at s241, makes it an offence to supply alcohol to a minor without the parent or guardian's permission.
It is exactly the right framework to use here, where you'd want to maintain parent ability to supply vapes if the kid has started smoking.
You could take the first three parts of s241, go through with a crayon, cross out the word alcohol, write in the word vape, stick it into the Smokefree Environments Act, and call it done.
I do not know why public health people concerned about youth vaping aren't arguing for this move.
