For the vapes that remain legal when purchased with a doctor’s prescription,further rules will apply:restrictions on flavours and colours,pharmaceutical-like packaging and limited nicotine concentrations and volumes. There will also be a total ban on single-use,disposable products.
Butler said he would also make it easier for people to get a prescription for “legitimate therapeutic use”. Currently,there are a limited number of doctors willing to prescribe vapes as a smoking cessation tool.
The TGA’s website says it has approved 1635 applications,although it only publicly identifies 277 in-person prescribers nationwide,and medical groups have typically only recommended vapes for smoking cessation as a last resort.
Butler will tell the National Press Club on Tuesday that vaping has undermined the success of former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon’s world-leading tobacco plain-packaging reforms.
“Vaping was sold to governments and communities around the world as a therapeutic product to help long-term smokers quit. It was not sold as a recreational product – especially not one for our kids. But that is what it has become:the biggest loophole in Australian history,” he will say,according to an extract of his speech.
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“Just like they did with smoking,Big Tobacco has taken another addictive product,wrapped it in shiny packaging and added flavours to create a new generation of nicotine addicts. This must end.”
The convenience store lobby group,some harm reduction experts and the Nationalshad pushed for vapes to be regulated like cigarettes so the government could reap $300 million in tax revenue – a proposalfiercely rebuffed by Butlerand the health sector.
The government will spend $63 million in next week’s budget on an evidence-based information campaign to discourage Australians from vaping or smoking.
A further $30 million will go towards quit support programs and training health practitioners in nicotine cessation. The tackling Indigenous smoking program will also be extended and widened to include vaping,for an extra $140 million.
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