Personal vaporiser and e-cigarette use by smokers and those who had recently quit has increased more than tenfold in just three years, and more than two in five admitted using nicotine in the devices, despite it being illegal without a medical prescription.
Dr Coral Gartner, a senior research fellow with the University of Queensland, said there was much confusion around what was legal and illegal because there were many laws involved.
Increasingly popular: More people, like Drew, from Canberra, are using e-cigarettes. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
“Different laws apply depending on whether the device contains nicotine or not and whether it makes a ‘therapeutic claim’ or not,” she said.
Dr Gartner and Anke van der Sterren from the Alcohol Tobacco and Other Drug Association ACT spoke about e-cigarettes and personal vaporisers at a conference in Canberra this week.
Dr Gartner said there was a need for the public to be provided with factual information about the products, including how to minimise short-term harms through safe storage and handling practices as well as what is known about the likely harmfulness of short and long-term use.
Ms van der Sterren agreed.
“There’s really a lack of information out there that people can rely on to give them some information about: do they want to use personal vaporisers or e-cigarettes and what should they use and where should they go for it and what’s legal and not legal,” she said.
“All the information people are looking for can be quite contradictory and difficult to make your way through so that’s a really big issue for us.”
She said there was debate about the safety of the devices, whether they were effective at helping smokers quit, if they were a gateway to smoking for young people and were they a way of renormalising smoking.
Dr Gartner said data on use of personal vaporisers by Australian smokers and former smokers who had quit recently had increased from 0.6 per cent in 2010 to 6.6 per cent by 2013.
More than 40 per cent of those reported using nicotine in their devices, despite it being illegal without a medical prescription.
Dr Gartner believes there was a need for federal, state and territory governments to consider whether the existing approach to regulation of both personal vaporisers, with and without nicotine, and regular cigarettes, was the optimal one for public health.
“There may be benefits in allowing Australian adults to have regulated access to nicotine for vaping. Particularly if this was linked to greater restrictions on how and where regular tobacco cigarettes are allowed to be sold,” she said”It would also assist with improving the packaging and labelling of vaporiser products and nicotine refill solutions.
Some blackmarket nicotine products are sold without accurate ingredient information or appropriate safe handling and storage information and without child safety enclosures.
Dr Gartner said it was legal in the ACT to possess, use, obtain and sell vaporisers without nicotine, providing they were not marketed as a cessation aid.
But it was unclear whether the devices could be used in public and were subject to smoking bans, she said.
Ms van der Sterren said ATODA hadreceived funding from ACT Health to put together some information about the devices for people.
“I think it will be really, really helpful and useful so people can make decisions,” she said.