All parents in Central Queensland were shocked but probably not surprised to see the footage of high school kids vaping in the toilet of a Central Queensland school recently. Vaping has exploded among students even while it is illegal to all Australians without a prescription.
In 2020 the then Health Minister, Greg Hunt, introduced a plan that required adults to get a prescription from a doctor to legally purchase the liquid nicotine used in vapes. He said that this change would “help prevent teenagers taking up pathways to smoking.”
As any parent would know this plan has failed and failed spectacularly. The temptation now would be to double down and seek to introduce even greater restrictions on vaping. This would only double the failure because prohibition never works.
In the late 1990s, a new service emerged called Napster. It allowed people to “exchange” digital music tracks online. It, in effect, allowed people to download any songs they wanted without having to pay for the CD. Even though it was illegal, millions of Australians did it.
There were initial attempts to crack down. Metallica took Napster to court as did some record labels. None of these efforts worked.
However, within just a few years Napster all but disappeared. Napster was destroyed because the music industry dropped its sue first strategy and developed a legal way for people to download music. I now pay for Spotify and I am happy to do so because it is a good service.
Likewise, the best way to end the black market for vaping is to introduce a better legal way for consenting adults to buy vapes. More than 1 million Australian adults now vape. Multiple scientific studies show that it is an effective way for people to give up smoking.
I don’t vape but I know lots of people who have better health, more money and can spend more time with their kids thanks to vaping.
The problem is just 8 per cent of those who vape have a prescription. And under the new laws you can only buy them in pharmacies, many of whom do not bother to stock them.
What we need is a system that lets adults access a drug that is less harmful than smoking but clamps down on illegal products sold to children.
Prohibition has encouraged the growth of a large, black market. One of the biggest concerns I have with this is we have no idea what is in the cheap, Chinese made vapes sold through this market.
The first thing a legal, regulated market would do is allow us to remove these products while allowing space for vaping products made by major suppliers with appropriate transparency on their labelling and information about their supply chains. Just like Spotify has killed Napster, a legal and regulated vape market would kill the market for the cheap Chinese knock offs.
The other benefit would be that under a regulated market we could get serious about strict regulations about how vapes are sold. We could mandate similar restrictions to smoking products like no advertising, plain packaging and storage behind cabinets. We could also ban the flavours of vapes that are clearly aimed at children.
I visited a Central Queensland school recently and I spoke to the Principal about vaping. When I asked whether they had an issue with smoking she said not at all. Yet smoking is legal for adults and vaping is all but prohibited. Nothing could demonstrate the point better. If we double down on the failed strategy of prohibition we will only make a bad situation on vaping worse.
