Global Courant 2023-05-02 05:50:00
SYDNEY – Australia on Tuesday proposed tightening e-cigarette laws, including introducing new import and packaging controls to ban vaping, especially among children, in the biggest crackdown on the tobacco industry in more than a decade.
The federal government will take steps to ban all disposable vapes and the import of non-prescription vapes, restrict both flavors and colors, and lower the permitted nicotine levels, with the goal of selling vapes only as products to help smokers quit.
“Just like they did with smoking, Big Tobacco has taken another addictive product, wrapped it in shiny packaging and added flavors to create a new generation of nicotine addicts,” Health Secretary Mark Butler will say in a speech to the National Press. Club. one of which was seen by Reuters.
Under the new rules, vapes must have pharmaceutical packaging.
Widely seen as a safer alternative to cigarette smoking and a product to help smokers quit, vaping involves heating a liquid containing nicotine in a so-called e-cigarette and converting it into a vapor that users inhale.
But Mr. Butler will say that vaping has now become a recreational product, marketed mainly to teens and young people.
“This is a product aimed at our children, sold alongside lollipops and chocolate bars,” Mr. Butler will say.
“Vaping has become the biggest behavioral problem in high schools. And it is becoming widespread in primary schools.”
The federal budget, due next week, will include A$234 million (S$207 million) to fund the new measures to protect against the harm caused by tobacco and vaping products, according to excerpts from the speech.
Australia has one of the strictest anti-smoking laws in the world, after in 2012 the country forced manufacturers to forego the conspicuous colorful branding and sell their cigarettes in dull uniform packs with no decorations.
Tobacco companies quickly switched to e-cigarettes with different flavors and created designs aimed at a new generation of users. REUTERS
