Western Australia’s state government is moving to introduce laws that could dump vaping into the same regulatory framework as the one that restricts smoking, according to a story by Cathy O’Leary for The West Australian.
Laws governing e-cigarettes in Australia are inconsistent. Western Australia (WA) effectively bans the sale of non-nicotine products by making it illegal to supply anything that resembles a tobacco product.
But WA is one of the few states not to ban people using them in non-smoking areas.
A parliamentary committee report chaired by Labor MLA Janine Freeman last year conceded the state’s laws were incomplete and loosely enforced.
“Anecdotal evidence suggests that many West Australians are unaware that nicotine e-cigarettes are illegal in Australia, and that selling a device that resembles a tobacco product is illegal in WA,” she wrote.
“For the time being at least, we have to work around a nonsensical regulation that allows the sale of nicotine for indisputably harmful tobacco products but not for a product which is widely regarded as less harmful.”
WA Health Minister Roger Cook, who supports a ban on e-cigarettes until their safety and effectiveness have been proved, said a review of WA’s tobacco laws would look at e-cigarettes.
“Towards the end of 2018, the Department of Health will conduct a further review of tobacco laws and I expect issues around all e-cigarettes to be front and centre,” he said.
Tag: Australia
Favoring combustibles
Plainly not working
Five years after Australia introduced standardized packaging on all tobacco products, data show that the policy has had no impact on reducing smoking across the country, according to a press note issued by Imperial Tobacco Canada through PRNewswire.
While the Australian government had admitted earlier this year that smoking rates had not declined since the introduction of standardized packaging – the first time the rates had not decreased in more than two decades – neither its Department of Health nor Canada’s normally-vocal anti-tobacco lobby had made any statements in response to the five-year milestone, the note said.
“We are not surprised that the data clearly indicates that implementing plain packaging has not worked in Australia,” Eric Gagnon, head of external and corporate affairs for Imperial Tobacco, was quoted as saying. “It’s time Canada recognized that efforts to legislate plain packaging will result in similar numbers.”
France, Imperial Tobacco said, had discovered the same. Tobacco sales had not decreased in the year since the country had introduced standardized packaging, and last week the country’s health minister, Agnès Buzyn, had stated in the legislature that “plain packaging has therefore not reduced official tobacco sales”.
“The answer to reducing the number of smokers is not, and has never been, plain packaging,” said Gagnon. “Plain packaging however does impact the sale of contraband tobacco products. Australia’s introduction of the legislation corresponded with a significant increase in the market share of illegal tobacco in the country, rising over 25 percent in the first two years [according to the KPMG report, Illicit tobacco in Australia 2016, https://home.kpmg.com/uk/en/home/insights/2017/04/illicit-tobacco-in-australia-2016.html].
“Plain packaging forces legal companies to abandon their symbols of legitimacy and makes it easier to counterfeit tobacco products. Canada must take a step back and look at the data. It’s the reasonable thing to do.”
Imperial said that as Canada’s Bill S-5, which mandates standardized packaging, moved to its second reading in the House of Commons, it wanted to remind legislators of the inefficiency of such packaging in other countries.
The company said that it supported the objective set forth by Health Canada to reduce the smoking rate to five percent by 2035, but believed the best way of achieving that goal was by offering consumers less-harmful alternatives.
“There is sound evidence telling us that vaping products are less-risky than traditional cigarettes, but they are currently illegal” said Gagnon. “Our government needs to embrace the harm-reduction model supported by other governments and public health experts, and provide Canadians with access to legal regulated vaping products as soon as possible.”
It’s all very tortured
Sinclair Davidson, a professor of economics in Australia, is due to tell the attendees at a dinner in Brussels on Thursday how it is possible to manipulate data to justify public policy.
The dinner is being hosted by the European smokers’ group Forest EU and the title of Davidson’s talk will be: ‘How to torture data to justify public policy’.
The event is due to address a number of questions including:
- How do public health groups cheat, change the rules of the game and move the goalposts without getting caught?
- Are public health organizations in the process of being disrupted?
- Five years on since it was introduced in Australia, has the mandatory standardized packaging of tobacco been a success or a failure?
Davidson is professor of institutional economics, finance and marketing at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] University. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and academic fellow at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance.
Speaking ahead of the event, Davidson said that government had lost its way. “Since abandoning its role as an impartial player in society it has taken to abusing the trust civil society invests in government,” he said. “The corresponding abuse of evidence based policy should alarm everyone with an interest in good policy.”
Meanwhile, Guillaume Périgois, spokesman for Forest EU, said too many regulations designed to advance public health were based not on undisputed evidence but on flawed data and wishful thinking.
“The danger is that inaccurate or cherry-picked data will be used to justify more nanny state policies, from higher taxation to alarmist warnings and further restrictions on lifestyle choices,” he said.
“Anyone who cares about scientific probity and good governance should be concerned by the questionable data that is often peddled by lobby groups and government officials.
“It’s time to question and hold to account the public health industry and the flawed and tortured information it frequently disseminates.”
Marking five-year failure
The UK smokers’ group, Forest, is calling for an independent review of the impact of standardized tobacco packaging.
The call comes after what Forest says have been five years of failure following the imposition of standardized tobacco packaging in Australia.
Commenting on today’s fifth anniversary of the introduction of standardised packs in Australia, Forest’s director, Simon Clark, said standardized packaging had been a “spectacular” failure in Australia.
“We were told it would deter people from smoking but the effect has been minimal,” he said.
“Data shows plain packaging has had no impact on the prevalence of smoking in Australia, which is the same now as it was in 2013.
“In fact, because of population growth, more people are smoking in Australia than five years ago.”
Clark said that smokers didn’t care about packaging. “It’s the product not the pack that matters,” he said.
“Plain packaging is no deterrent to teenagers either. Few people ever started smoking because they were attracted to the pack.”
The UK government followed Australia’s lead and introduced standardized packaging in 2016.
And now Clark is urging the UK government to commission an independent review of the impact of standardized packaging as part of its new tobacco control plan that was announced in July.
“Policies,” he said, “should be evidence-based. Plain packaging is based not on evidence but on wishful thinking.
“The measure has failed in Australia and it will fail in the UK.”
Plain packaging not working
Fifty-nine percent of Australians believe that standardized tobacco packaging has been ineffective, according to a CanvasU poll commissioned by Japan Tobacco International.
JTI said the recent poll had been conducted to provide understanding about Australians’ views on the country’s standardized-tobacco-packaging policy, five years after its implementation.
The research found that while 59 percent of Australians believe that standardized packaging has been ineffective, 80 percent of them believe the government wouldn’t change or would be reluctant to change a preferred policy even if the evidence were weighted against it.
According to a note posted on JTI’s website, even the Australian government’s data justified such public scepticism. The most recent figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed that ‘…while smoking rates have been on a long-term downward trend, for the first time in over two decades, the daily smoking rate did not significantly decline over the most recent three-year period (2013 to 2016)’.
“Unsurprisingly, early data from France and the United Kingdom is pointing in the same direction”, Michiel Reerink, JTI’s global regulatory strategy vice president, was quoted as saying.
JTI said that, according to a new report published by Europe Economics, the implementation of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD2) and the introduction of standardized packaging requirements in the UK and France, had not had any impact on smoking rates or tobacco sales.
Recent data published by the French public authorities confirmed that, after nine months, the level of tobacco-product distribution to retailers had remained stable.
‘Around the world, anti-tobacco activists and some health authorities are calling for similar experimental policies to be rolled-out on other product categories such as alcohol, sugary drinks and fast food, JTI said. ‘In December 2016, Public Health England published a report calling for plain packaging on alcohol, a topic which has been raised again this month by medical journal The Lancet. In Canada, the Ontario Medical Association has mocked up images of plain packaging on food and drink products.’
JTI added that it was therefore no surprise that CanvasU’s research had found that at least half of Australians thought it was likely that standardized packaging would be introduced on alcohol and food & drink with a high sugar content in the future; or that it was already in place.
In fact, a majority of Australians expected this policy to be just the start of an escalation in lifestyle regulation in the future.
“An increasing number of regulators are looking at extreme tobacco-style regulations on other product categories without considering proper evidence or research into the consequences,” said Reerink. “Brand owners should be worried about this domino-effect as policy-makers won’t stop with tobacco.”
More litigation sought
Governments should consider litigation against the tobacco industry to recover the ‘massive’ health care costs associated with the use of their products, according to a story in The Conversation based on a commentary published in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) yesterday.
In the commentary, Dr, Ross MacKenzie, a lecturer in Health Studies at Macquarie University, along with his co-authors, Eric LeGresgley and Mike Daube, of the MJA, said that these costs were borne by Australia’s health care system.
But there were now a number of reasons why this was an opportune time to consider legal action.
Firstly, the costs were increasing. Tobacco was still a critical public health issue and remained the leading cause of preventable death, killing 15,000 Australians every year. Associated social and economic costs were estimated to be A$31 billion annually in 2008, and were now likely to be considerably greater.
Secondly, anti-tobacco support was strong. Support for tobacco control in Australia remained strong, as had been demonstrated by standardized tobacco-packaging legislation and widespread political backing for tobacco tax increases.
Thirdly, legal action was supported by the World Health Organization. Legal action was an increasingly important tobacco control instrument, whose value was recognised by the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which Australia had ratified.
Fourthly, such litigation was already happening elsewhere. The tobacco industry had recently experienced a series of international legal setbacks including challenges to Australia’s standardized tobacco-packaging legislation.
The story is at: https://theconversation.com/four-reasons-the-australian-government-should-consider-litigation-against-tobacco-companies-87511.
Australia under e-pressure
A major international study into electronic cigarettes has prompted healthcare professionals to encourage Australian smokers to switch to vaping, according to a story by Troy Nankervis for Triple M radio.
“For those smokers who won’t or can’t quit, the next best thing would be to switch to vaping,” said Hayden McRobbie, professor of public health interventions at Queen Mary University of London, UK.
McRobbie is a co-author of the Cochrane Review into e-cigarettes, which found that using these devices could help people quit smoking but which conceded the evidence was weak due to limited data.
“I think Australia is missing a huge public health opportunity in its opposition to e-cigarettes,” McRobbie said.
“While the long-term risks are not entirely clear, there is broad consensus now that they are much less harmful than tobacco cigarettes.”
And unlike second-hand smoke, second-hand vapor posed no identified health risks to by-standers, he added.
After consulting with McRobbie, the New Zealand Ministry of Health is set to legalize and regulate the sale of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes from mid-2018.
And now, associate professor Colin Mendelsohn of the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of NSW has urged the Australian medical community to follow suit.
“It [is] good to see New Zealand following the scientific evidence and the lead of the UK, where e-cigarettes have now helped over two million smokers quit,” he said.
“The sooner these products are legalized in Australia, the more lives will be saved.”
Warning on filters
Filter cigarettes should be recalled from sale in Australia and the tobacco industry forced to pay local government and water authorities for cleaning up the toxic waste caused by discarded butts, according to a story in The Conversation.
Australians should not be misled about the existence of a ‘safer’ cigarette, the story said. There wasn’t one.
But without filters, the number of lethal lung cancers might be reduced, more smokers would quit because of the harsh taste of unfiltered smoke, and fewer young people would start smoking.
The story also attacked the use of ventilation holes in filters, which were said to be present on 90 percent of the licit cigarettes sold in Australia.
Larger modern filters with tiny holes introduced more air into each puff, making the smoke inhaled feel easier on the throat, the story said.
But to extract a constant nicotine dose, smokers compensated by taking deeper puffs, and more of them.
This decreased smokers’ exposure to just a few carcinogens, but increased their exposure to more harmful smoke components in the vapor phase of the smoke.
This change in smoking behavior had caused a major upsurge during the past 30 years or so in adenocarcinomas. On the other hand, central squamous cell cancers, cancers of larger lung tissue, had reduced in parallel, but this had had no effect on cancer numbers overall.
A review of evidence on filters and cancer had found filter ventilation had contributed to the rise in lethal adenocarcinomas, and recommended filter ventilation be banned.
The full story is at: https://theconversation.com/filters-a-cigarette-engineering-hoax-that-harms-both-smokers-and-the-environment-85393.
Public statements sought
Australian anti-smoking advocates say that a US court order forcing tobacco companies to air statements about the dangers of smoking should be mirrored in Australia, according to a story in The Guardian.
Public health experts have written to the Australian heads of tobacco companies calling on them to run statements about the lethal nature of smoking and the addictiveness of smoking and nicotine.
The advocates want the companies also to reveal their deliberate attempts to make tobacco products more addictive.
In 2012, the Guardian said, the US federal court ordered major tobacco companies to run statements in the media admitting they had deceived US consumers for decades about the dangers of smoking. That decision had been upheld by the court in April, and the first of the statements was due to air next month in leading newspapers and on the ABC, CBS and NBC television networks.
The statements are due to run weekly for one year and are said to be costing the companies millions of dollars.
The court case has prompted a coalition of public health experts to write to the heads of British American Tobacco and Philip Morris in Australia calling on them to tell the truth about their tobacco products in a similar campaign.
‘We hope that you will share our view that Australians are entitled to the same level of information as the American public about these companies’ deceitful practices and the ways in which these companies and the tobacco industry more broadly have lied to the public and your consumers over decades,’ the letter states.
Australia is guiding light
Malaysia is keen to learn and employ tobacco-control strategies employed by Australia, according to a story in The New Straits Times.
Speaking at the 69th session of the World Health Organization Regional Committee for the Western Pacific in Brisbane, Malaysia’s Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr. S. Subramaniam congratulated Australia for significantly reducing smoking among its citizens.
“The prevalence of smoking in Australia is only 11 per cent against Malaysia’s 23 per cent,” he said, while delivering a speech as the event’s outgoing chairperson.
“We are very excited to see how Australia has managed to achieve this remarkable figure.
“Close co-operation and exchange of views on the practices employed in the area of tobacco control will support other countries in the region to fight this major health issue.”
