Vaping crackdown a welcome solution
Vapes are targeted at children and young people who have never smoked, and the federal government's new crackdown is a good decision, AMA Queensland President Dr Maria Boulton has told ABC Radio.
Transcript: AMA Queensland President Dr Maria Boulton, ABC Brisbane, Drive with Terri Begley, Tuesday 2 May 2023
Subject: Federal vaping crackdown
TERRI BEGLEY: Under new rules announced at the Press Club today, non-prescription vapes will be banned from importation. They'll only be allowed to be sold in pharmacies with a doctor's script, and in pharmaceutical-like packaging with certain flavours, colours, and other ingredients banned, and also the concentration and volume of nicotine reduced. All single-use disposable vapes will also be banned.
And, as part of other measures to try to decrease the amount of smoking, the tax on tobacco will also increase 5 per cent each year for the next three years as the government tries to curb cigarette smoking through these higher costs. Dr Maria Boulton is the President of the Australian Medical Association Queensland. Good afternoon, doctor.
DR MARIA BOULTON: Good afternoon, Terri.
TERRI BEGLEY: Your initial reaction to the crackdown on the access to and the sale of recreational vapes here in Australia?
DR MARIA BOULTON: We welcome this. I don't know if you know, but Queensland was awarded the Dirty Ashtray Award last year because of our lack of regulation and enforcement of regulation on vaping products, meaning that too many children and adolescents were getting access to it freely. I think that given that vapes have been shown to be not only toxic if ingested, but also there's a lot of emerging evidence that they are as dangerous as smoking is, we believe that this is a welcome solution.
TERRI BEGLEY: Yes, the federal Health Minister today gave some pretty sobering statistics in particular on how many young people have taken up this practice.
HEALTH MINISTER MARK BUTLER: One in six teenagers aged 14 to 17 has vaped. One in four young Australians aged 18 to 24 has also vaped. Only one in 70 my age has vaped.
TERRI BEGLEY: Dr Maria Boulton, are you seeing the similar use of vapes across the community in terms of younger people tending to get their hands on these products?
DR MARIA BOULTON: Yeah, absolutely. And we're seeing it across schools as well. The ease with which these kids can get their hands on vapes is just incredible. Another statistic is that people who vape are three times more likely to pick up smoking. So it is a gateway drug to smoking, which is why we're so concerned about it. Australia leads away when it comes to smoking cessation, but we've been behind the eight-ball when it comes to controlling vaping access to children and adolescents.
TERRI BEGLEY: And the Health Minister today during his address at the Press Club said that in fact, young people under the age of 25, they're starting to see an increase in cigarette smoking. So again, it reinforces that argument that these vapes are not getting people off cigarettes. They're actually introducing them to them.
DR MARIA BOULTON: Correct. We know that people who have never smoked before are vaping. It's not like they're smoking and then going to vapes - it's the other way around. And when we look at the vapes, the way that they're marketed with flavours such as bubble gum, tutti frutti, peppermint, watermelon, and they come in those really bright-coloured packages, I mean, there's no denying who they're marketed to. They're marketed to children and adolescents.
TERRI BEGLEY: Yeah, it's a real concern, and the Health Minister did mention that. He said, "no more flavours, no more making it accessible to a younger sort of person." But if the vapes disappear right off the shelves of the retailers and teenagers aren't getting their hands on them via that method, by getting perhaps someone who's over 18 to go and buy the vapes for them, do you have any concerns that then they may turn to cigarettes? Because they will still be able to buy cigarettes, even not through their own methods.
DR MARIA BOULTON: Look, that is always a concern. There's always going to be a black market for things that are tightly regulated, and it's up to the government to ensure that that doesn't happen. The minister announced some funding to go towards education. We need to ensure that education challenges students to actually understand the dangers of both vaping and smoking and every other thing that's dangerous that we know that children and adolescents should probably not be doing. But at the end of the day, if we can make it harder for them to access - at the moment, it's just way too easy and it's running rampant through schools. And the other thing he said was that it's the number one behaviour issue that schools are having to deal with. When kids come home and they report that they went into the bathroom and it smelled like watermelon or bubble gum, it is a concern.
TERRI BEGLEY: You're listening to Dr Maria Boulton, President of the Australian Medical Association Queensland. She’s giving the GP’s view on this crackdown on the availability of recreational vapes. It's a big crackdown that the Federal Health Minister has announced today. A greater role in terms of doctors. Now I'll just play a bit of the Federal Health Minister announcing that GPs will play more of a role than they have before around prescribing the use of vapes. Here's what Mark Butler had to say on that.
MARK BUTLER: A script is really hard to come by. Only one in 20 doctors are authorised by the TGA to prescribe vapes to those who need it. And we think this has to change. It will require removing the restrictions on doctors prescribing so that all doctors can write a script for those who really need it. Governments will also consider whether other proper therapeutic pathways should be examined to allow patients to obtain vapes through a pharmacy where they need them.
TERRI BEGLEY: Maria Boulton, how will the prescribing changes impact doctors here in Queensland?
DR MARIA BOULTON: What we expect is that maybe with these changes, every GP will be able to prescribe nicotine vapes, increasing the number of GPs that can do that. At the end of the day, we need to remind people that GPs are at the forefront of helping people to quit smoking and quit vaping. We do this day-in, day-out. Vaping is one of those things that we can use as a tool to help people quit smoking, but it's not the best tool. It's not first-line, it's not second-line, it's just another tool.
What I would encourage the government to do is to ensure that they look at the other tools available to help patients quit smoking and vaping, and ensure that there's enough funding for that as well, not just go down the line to facilitate these vaping scripts, but facilitate the first-line and the second-line smoking and vaping cessation tools that we use day-in, day-out.
TERRI BEGLEY: So it's not going to be particularly easier just to get your hands on vapes by getting a script from the doctor. You’re not just going to sign scripts away and just be handing out this go-card for going and get getting vapes.
DR MARIA BOULTON: Absolutely not. And a script is never just a script. A script involves finding out why the patient is requesting that script, whether it is the most appropriate treatment for that patient and whether it's the best way for that patient to spend their money and time in getting to the outcome that they want to get to. And, once again, whenever we prescribe anything for smoking cessation, it's always accompanied with counseling as well. So it's important that people are funded to have that access to ensure that they can spend time with their GP to discuss all those options.
TERRI BEGLEY: Dr Boulton, I want to get your response to this. Earlier in the program, we spoke with Theo Foukkare. He's the CEO of the Australian Association of Convenience Stores, and he stepped through some of the arguments in which his body is opposed to this crackdown. One of the arguments was that it's going to drive illegal content in the products underground. Further, there's still going to be a black market in it. But he said something interesting around the doctor model of writing scripts. He said the GP prescription only model has already failed. And he also said that this is going to put a lot of extra pressure on GPs. I'll play a little bit of his audio.
THEO FOUKKARE: There are 30,000 GPs in Australia, and currently only 300 are publicly available and authorised to provide a script. Let me put it to you this way. We have a GP crisis in Australia. It's hard enough to see a GP as it is. What Mark Butler wants to do is send 1.3 million adults every three months into their GP at a cost of $50 million a quarter to get a script to clog up the health system, and you end up with people that need care not being able to get care.
TERRI BEGLEY: Dr Boulton, your response?
DR MARIA BOULTON: We know that the GP model has been really successful in smoking cessation, so we know that it works. We also know that at the moment, currently, if you are an adult who needs to have a nicotine-containing vape for smoking cessation reasons, for example, you can only get that now through a script anyway. So that won't change. That'll be continuing to happen the same way it's been happening.
This issue with access to GPs, it's an important issue, but at the end of the day, we know that the GP model works. We know that it is essential for the federal budget to ensure that there is enough funding there for people to continue to have access to their GPs. We know that for a fact. We know that it's been successful in the past and we know that with correct funding then we can continue doing what we're doing, which is helping people stopping smoking and stopping vaping.
TERRI BEGLEY: Do you think overall, the fact that it will only be sold in pharmacies and with restrictions on flavours, this is going to have an immediate impact on young people?
DR MARIA BOULTON: Most definitely. I think if we can curtail the access of young people who sometimes don't understand the dangers of vaping - I was at a school event, not my kids' school, but a sports event, and I heard two girls, they couldn't have been older than 13 discussing vapes and what flavours they had in their bags and how it was safe. And I think whatever we can do to ensure that the message is getting across that it isn't safe is what we need to do, because otherwise we're going to have another generation of people addicted to vapes, addicted to smoking. And the effects of that are catastrophic, not only just on the economy.
As a GP, we do a lot of lung function testing for workplaces, and you can actually track the people who smoke, how the lung function just decreases over time. When you show them that, they're quite surprised and they say, "oh my goodness, I didn't know that." And when you have a job where your lungs need to be fit and healthy for that job, it's really, really important and it affects everything. So I guess the more education we can do, the more we can restrict access of children and adolescents, which we know is too easy at the moment, the better. Because otherwise in 10, 20 years time, who knows where we're going to be? I was really happy to hear this news today because I think we need to do something very definitive about vaping because it wasn't heading in the right direction.
TERRI BEGLEY: I think you'll have a lot of parents nodding their head quietly at what you've just said on that if our text line and the phone calls are anything to go by.
And just finally, before you go, the Health Minister today also announced that the tax on tobacco is going to go up 15 per cent in the next three years. And I'm wondering, as a GP, do you see an immediate impact where that price point starts to kick in for someone who is a smoker and they come in and tell you and they say, "that's it, I'm giving them away"?
DR MARIA BOULTON: Most definitely. And that's supported by statistics and studies. But at the end of the day, smoking is terribly addictive and there needs to be that funding to ensure that people who are addicted to smoking who want to quit, get the support that they need. Because otherwise it's not fair on them. They need to have that help, that accessible, well-priced help to actually give up that habit that we know is terribly addictive.
TERRI BEGLEY: Really good to hear your perspective on this afternoon. Thanks again.
DR MARIA BOULTON: Thank you.
TERRI BEGLEY: Dr Maria Boulton, who is President of AMA Queensland.
