A tobacco company and New Zealand’s Ministry of Health are locking horns in court for a week-long battle over the sale of a tobacco device, according to a story by Frances Cook for nzherald.co.nz.
Philip Morris is defending two charges over the sale of its HEETS tobacco sticks that are used in its IQOS electronic heated-tobacco device.
If the ministry proves that the product is for oral use, but not smoking, that would make it illegal under current New Zealand law.
Health ministry prosecutor Sally Carter told the Wellington District Court that the issue came down to legal fine print.
“It’s the heat sticks that contain tobacco, and there’s no problem that this product contains tobacco.
“The real problem is whether this product falls within the Smokefree [Environments] Act 1990,” she said.
“Significantly, because of the way the Act is structured there are issues whether in fact the product is a smoking issue, and a smoking product.
“The definition of ‘to smoke’ means that the product needs to be ignited.”
Philip Morris is said to be defending the charges, arguing that HEETS comprise a smoking product, even though the tobacco in them is heated, not burned.
The two charges the company faces carry a maximum penalty of NZ$10,000.
Tag: New Zealand
Yes, but is it legal?
E-cigs as treatment aid
Researchers in New Zealand say that more thought should be given to the use of electronic cigarettes in hospitals because the use of these products can lessen the stress of patients’ treatment, according to a stuff.co.nz story.
Dr. Penelope Truman of Massey University’s School of Health Sciences said its research had found that e-cigarettes could aid patients battling alcohol addiction and patients admitted to psychiatric units.
More than 40 patients at Kenepuru Hospital in Porirua were studied in two cohorts between 2013 and 2016.
Truman said there were similar reductions in smoking when patients were offered e-cigarettes or conventional nicotine-replacement therapies, such as patches or gum.
The trial had shown there were no “significant” problems with patients using e-cigarettes in a hospital setting, and that these products could be beneficial.
On the other hand, going outside for a smoke could create a lot of problems for patients and the staff trying to care for them.
Alcoholics who were also smokers were offered the option of using an e-cigarette as well as, or instead of, conventional nicotine replacement therapy to stop smoking while in hospital.
The e-cigarettes proved to be more popular than standard therapy, and were at least as effective, Truman said.
“This is only a little trial, but I think it does raise some questions,” she said. “A lot of people are going to have to reconsider how they feel about people vaping around them, because it’s going to become increasingly popular.”
The full story is at: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/101689960/ecigarettes-could-have-a-positive-impact-in-hospital-environments-research-finds.Selling pharmacies
A quarter of New Zealand’s pharmacies would ‘strongly consider’ selling tobacco if pharmacies comprised its only legal outlet, according to a story by Megan Haggan for ajp.com.au, citing the results of a new study.
In recent years, anti-tobacco activists in New Zealand and elsewhere have suggested various ways in which smoke-free goals might be achieved, including the restriction of tobacco-product sales to pharmacies.
The concept was apparently raised last year by University of Otago researcher Dr. Lindsay Robertson, who conducted interviews with 25 health experts and found that restricting the accessibility of tobacco products was seen as critical in reducing sales.
The experts supported restrictions such as allowing sales only in limited numbers of tobacco-only stores or pharmacies, located away from schools.
In Iceland, a private member’s bill was introduced in 2011, which proposed a 10-year plan that would have seen the number of tobacco retailers reduced until in the last year of the plan, only pharmacies would have been able to sell tobacco. At that point, sales would have been combined with advice on smoking cessation. This plan was not implemented.
Since then, Frederieke Sanne Petrović-van der Deen and Nick Wilson, of the University of Otago, have explored the attitudes of New Zealand pharmacists towards such schemes, conducting interviews at 30 pharmacies in Wellington.
They found that a quarter were ‘very likely’ to sell tobacco if pharmacies were the only legal outlet for its sale, and that this proportion increased to more than a third if the strategy had been proven to work elsewhere in the world.
‘These modest levels of support among pharmacists at least suggest it could be worthwhile to perform further research, and to possibly have an open discussion with pharmacists along with their professional organisations to explore the wider acceptability and feasibility of this idea, the researchers wrote.Blunt instruments preferred
With the tax on tobacco increased a further 10 percent in New Zealand this month, one of the country’s major supermarket chains has started selling electronic cigarettes, according to a story in The New Zealand Herald.
Progressive Enterprises, which owns Countdown, FreshChoice and SuperValue supermarkets, confirmed it had been trialing the sale of e-cigarettes without nicotine in 20 of its stores around the country since December 20.
The Herald said the move could be a major step toward making the sale of e-cigarettes mainstream in New Zealand.
According to the Ministry of Health, selling non-nicotine e-cigarettes is legal.
The sale of nicotine-based products for e-cigarettes is currently illegal, though they are widely available and their status is under review by the government.
The new Labor-led government has continued the previous administration’s policy of an annual increase in excise tax on tobacco in support of its Smoke-free 2025 initiative.
The Ministry of Health said it believed increasing the price of tobacco was the single most effective measure to reduce tobacco consumption.No time for e-cigarettes
The New Zealand government is being accused of dragging its feet over legalizing nicotine-containing vapor products, according to a story by Fergus Mason for vapingpost.com.
In March, the government announced that it planned to end a ban on nicotine liquids and embrace electronic cigarettes as part of its tobacco-free plans.
A consultation was launched in August but, in September, a new government was elected, and it seems less enthusiastic about vaping than was the previous government.
Meanwhile, the country is facing an epidemic of violent robberies at convenience stores as criminals target tobacco products, which have become hugely expensive following tax hikes.
In New Zealand, a pack of cigarettes sells for an amount equal to the value of its weight in silver, yet such packs are sold in small, vulnerable shops.
The situation has become such that the police have launched a special fund to help small businesses increase security.
Associate health minister Jenny Salesa is on record as saying that the government had not had time fully to consider e-cigarettes.Smokers over-taxed
Is it ethical for the New Zealand government to collect nearly $2 billion in extra tax from addicted smokers while spending only three percent of the money on helping them to quit? Should an addicted ‘pack-a-day’ smoker have to pay an extra NZ$7,000 in tax each year?
These questions were posed in an opinion piece in The Dominion Post by Kathy Spencer, a former deputy director-general in the Ministry of Health and a former manager of personal and indirect tax in the Treasury who has worked also as a senior advisor to a Minister of Health and a Minister of Revenue.
Spencer said that with a new government about to review the tax system, it was time for a fresh look at how to reduce smoking in New Zealand.
For a very long time, the tax on tobacco had been the government’s primary weapon against smoking. It was claimed to be the most effective method, but Māori, Pasifika and low-income groups had been slower to give up smoking than had other New Zealanders; so the people within these groups were paying a disproportionate share of this tax, which was going up relentlessly.
Spencer said a common belief was that the tobacco tax was there to cover the public health costs associated with smoking, including passive smoking.
First off, the idea that smokers should be expected to meet these costs was highly questionable since people who were overweight or had bad diets were not expected to pay extra towards their health costs. New Zealand’s public health system simply didn’t work that way, and nor should it.
However, even if were accepted that smokers should pay for health costs, it started to become clear 10 years ago that they were over-paying. A 2007 study commissioned by tobacco control groups concluded: ‘It appears likely that smokers contribute considerably more in taxes than the net “economic costs” to the rest of the community caused by their smoking’.
Spencer said that in 2012, the Treasury also acknowledged that the tax revenue was probably higher than the direct health system costs of smoking. And it noted that smokers received less superannuation and aged care, reducing costs in these areas.
‘Taking these savings into account means that smokers have been paying their own way, and more, for years,’ Spencer said.
Spencer’s piece, which includes suggestions for tackling the tobacco-tax issue, is at: https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/100188998/tax-burden-unfair-on-smokers.
Teenage smoking plummets
The smoking rate among New Zealand teenagers has dropped by a third since last year, according to a Radio New Zealand story citing Ministry of Health figures.
The country’s Quitline was quoted as saying that this year 8,000 15-17-year-olds ‘are smoking’, down from 12,000 last year. A decade ago there were said to have been 35,000 in this age group ‘taking up the habit’.
Quitline’s clinical director Sharryn Gannon said the majority of young people were not picking up cigarettes – a trend that was creating “a new generation of ‘never-smokers’”.
Gannon said the average smoker took up the habit at age 14, and that if people could make it to age 25 without taking up smoking then it was likely they would never smoke.
Meanwhile, the overall smoking rate in New Zealand also has decreased, a decrease that included a five percent reduction among Maori men during the past two years.
Gannon said the increasing price of cigarettes and the availability of e-cigarettes were also reasons why people were quitting the habit.
E-cig aid to Smokefree goal
New Zealand’s Ministry of Health believes that electronic cigarettes have the potential to contribute to the country’s Smokefree 2025 goal, according to a position statement published on health.govt.nz.
The potential of e-cigarettes to help improve public health depended on the extent to which they could act as a route out of smoking for New Zealand’s 550,000 daily smokers, without providing a route into smoking for children and non-smokers.
Recent decisions taken by the government had increased the focus on harm reduction and the aim of supporting smokers to switch to significantly less harmful products such as e-cigarettes.
But the ministry encouraged smokers who wanted to use e-cigarettes to quit smoking to seek the support of local stop smoking services. Local stop smoking services provided smokers with the best chance of quitting successfully and should support smokers who wanted to quit with the help of e-cigarettes.
The ministry listed the following key messages:
- The best thing smokers can do for their health is to quit smoking for good.
- E-cigarettes are intended for smokers only.
- The Ministry believes e-cigarettes could disrupt inequities and contribute to Smokefree 2025.
- The evidence on e-cigarettes indicates they carry much less risk than smoking cigarettes but are not risk free.
- The Cochrane Review found that e-cigarettes can help people to quit smoking, but acknowledges that the evidence is weak due to little data.
- Smokers who have tried other methods of quitting without success could be encouraged to try e-cigarettes to stop smoking. Stop smoking services should support smokers using e-cigarettes to quit.
- There is no international evidence that e-cigarettes are undermining the long-term decline in cigarette smoking among adults and youth, and may in fact be contributing to it.
- Despite some experimentation with e-cigarettes among never smokers, e-cigarettes are attracting very few people who have never smoked into regular e-cigarette use.
- When used as intended, e-cigarettes pose no risk of nicotine poisoning to users, but e-liquids should be in child resistant packaging.
- The Ministry of Health is identifying safety standards for e-cigarettes in New Zealand. In the meantime, vapers should buy their products from a reputable source such as specialist retailers.
Call for lower excise taxes
The New Zealand member of parliament and ACT party leader David Seymour has called for tobacco-product excise taxes to be lowered, according to a story by Sam Carran for Newstalk ZB.
Seymour says that the doubling of such taxes during the past five years has led to an increase in crimes against retailers.
Nearly 500 such robberies committed during the past year were said to have been related to tobacco.
“People who are doing these robberies are the scum of the earth and they should all be hung, drawn and quartered or whatever the maximum is allowed under the Crimes Act as it stands,” Seymour added.
NZ to legalize smokeless
The sale of smokeless tobacco products is to be legalized in New Zealand with a view to providing smokers with less-risky alternatives to cigarettes, according to a story by Rachel Thomas for stuff.co.nz.
Associate Health Minister Nicky Wagner said yesterday that some smokeless products available internationally, including heat-not-burn, snus, moist snuff, dissolvables and inhaled nicotine devices, might be significantly safer than were cigarettes.
Additionally, she added, restricting sales of these products might exacerbate supply and demand issues; for example, by encouraging black market sales.
Current laws ban the import, sale and distribution of tobacco products described as suitable for chewing or any other oral use besides smoking.
In her announcement Wagner said the government intended to establish a pre-market approval system for smokeless tobacco and nicotine-delivery products, other than e-cigarettes.
“This is part of new thinking – a forward looking approach, building on some of the innovative new technologies that are available intentionally to try and give smokers safer alternatives to tobacco,” she said.
Under pre-market approval provisions, smokeless products could be sold legally only after manufacturers had demonstrated that the use of these products was significantly less harmful than was tobacco smoking.
Wagner made her announcement in front of health experts and advocates who were presenting the Achieving Smoke-free Aotearoa Project (ASAP) – a road map on how to achieve the country’s smoke-free 2025 goal.
Their plan called for the government to reduce the availability and convenience of tobacco products, to place severe restrictions on retailers and to impose massive cigarette tax increases.
Project leader, University of Otago Wellington Professor Richard Edwards, reportedly was “a bit taken aback” by Wagner’s announcement.
“We put all these recommendations and things in the report and this wasn’t one of them,” he said of Wagner’s announcement.
Edwards said the government should assess the impact of new laws on e-cigarettes, which are set to come into effect next year – before adding other types of tobacco-containing products.