Australia: Doctor Pleads For E-Cigarette Reforms

Source from:  Yahoo7 News 07/13/2017

Australia must make it as easy as possible for smokers to get their hands on e-cigarettes, a doctor and drug reform advocate says.

A parliamentary committee is hearing evidence about the health risks associated with e-cigarettes, compared to combustible tobacco products, and how such products should be regulated.

Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation president Dr Alex Wodak says health authorities must accept the large body of evidence that e-cigarettes, or nicotine vaping products, are vastly less harmful than combustible tobacco products.

The retired physician said many smokers would never be able to give up, and maintaining that fantasy while denying them a safer product was wrong.

Dr Wodak cited a Public Health England study that found e-cigarettes can be 95% safer than the alternative, because it's the smoke, not the nicotine, that damages human bodies.

He said opening up access to a wide range of attractive products that appeal to smokers makes good sense from a public health perspective.

"It's very important, in harm reduction and public health generally, to have your intervention (be) attractive to the people most at risk," Dr Wodak told the committee on Wednesday.

Australia was currently experiencing the same kind of debate around vaping products that once raged around providing methadone to heroin addicts, he said.

"Most parents would rather have their son or daughter alive and on methadone than dead and not on methadone," he told the committee.

"And that's what it (the e-cigarette debate) really amounts to."

Dr Wodak said smoking rates had fallen in the e-cigarette-friendly countries of the UK and the US.

Studies had shown almost all e-cigarette users, or vapers, were former smokers, and there was no evidence that young people who'd not formerly smoked were suddenly turning to vaping.

"I think having a vibrant vaping community network, through the distribution of vaping shops, is very important from a public health perspective," he said.

Two thirds of all smokers will die from a smoking-relating diseases, and Dr Wodak said denying them a less harmful option if they couldn't quit their nicotine additions was wrong.

In February, Australia's medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, decided to maintain a ban on nicotine e-cigarettes

It said the ban would remain, arguing e-cigarettes could have a negative impact on tobacco control and may "re-normalise" smoking.

E-cigarette devices are legal in Australia but the sale and possession of the nicotine used in them is illegal.

The committee is hearing from drug reform advocates, doctors and tobacco companies moving into the e-products market, and also examining regulatory frameworks for e-smoking products.

The hearing continues. Enditem