Australia’s Senate has established a committee to examine vaping and the senator leading the committee, Hollie Hughes, has quit smoking cigarettes and started vaping instead.
“I had zero intention of quitting.”
It wasn’t her intent when she started out. She reportedly did not intend to quit smoking, rather, she just wanted to see what vaping was all about. So she consulted an Australian physician, received a prescription for nicotine e-cigarettes, and started vaping. More than three months have passed since she started vaping and now she says the notion of smoking a cigarette makes her “feel quite ill.”
After making the switch, she says she no longer has any need or desire to smoke cigarettes and has saved thousands of dollars by switching. It is worth noting that Australia’s cigarette prices, along with New Zealand’s, are higher than anywhere else on the planet. For her, a pack of cigarettes costs A$58.
After more than three months without a cigarette, she says she’s saved over A$2,500. Imagine what that savings might be over the course of a year, two years, and so on. Clearly, Hughes now stands to save a very significant sum of money by vaping instead of smoking.
Australia’s Health Minister, Greg Hunt, tried unsuccessfully to ban the importation of any vaping products that contain nicotine. First, he proposed a ban without party room consultation. Backbenchers were caught completely off-guard by the move and quickly responded along with MPs from across the aisle. A total of 28 MPs from both the Liberal and National parties signed an open letter that called on him to cancel his ban proposal. Eventually, he did, but not before first postponing it for six months.
With the ban now cancelled, Australia’s future for smokers and vapers is brighter. The opportunity exists for the country’s smokers and vapers to import nicotine e-liquid for personal use, but things may change not too long from now.
After listening to submissions, the Senate Select Committee on Tobacco Harm Reduction that Hughes is the chair of issues a majority report calling for a doctor-supervised prescription model for nicotine vaping products.
While the new prescription model does not go into effect until later this year, there is still hope that e-cigarettes and e-liquid that contain nicotine will be regulated similar to cigarettes in the country, allowing them to be sold at local shops like cigarettes are. And although the committee investigating vaping that Hughes leads recommended a prescription model, Hughes herself dissented and instead recommended that nicotine e-cigs be regulated as a consumer product, as cigarettes are.
She told the Sydney Morning Herald that she hopes “we can work with the health minister to say there are people that just want to consume nicotine in a safer way than cigarettes, and you can buy cigarettes pretty much everywhere.”
While the ban has been scrapped and a prescription model is currently on the horizon for Australian vapers, access to nicotine vaping products in the country continues thanks to online vape stores that are technically based outside of the country. This is a practice that has been allowed on a federal level, as the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) currently has a personal importation scheme that allows Australians to import vaping products with nicotine in them. For some time now, this is how many Australian vapers have been getting their supplies.
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