Read articles from Australia

July 18, 2023 by colinmendelsohn.com.au

FORTY FIVE LEADING TOBACCO TREATMENT, public health and addiction experts from Australia and New Zealand are urging lawmakers to listen to the Australian National Advisory Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ANACAD) ahead of Health Minister Mark Butler’s proposed vaping crackdown. In a letter sent to all state, territory and federal members of parliament today, Tuesday 18 July 2023, the experts fully endorsed the Council’s concerns about the proposed regulations

July 17, 2023 by colinmendelsohn.com.au

Vaping in Australia has been a harrowing and unpredictable roller coaster ride. Bullied and terrorised by successive Health Ministers, many vapers feel like collateral damage in an ideological war. One vaper pulls no punches and tells her heart-wrenching story.

Born into a family of intergenerational cigarette smokers, I was always surrounded by (...)

July 05, 2023 by crikey.com.au

Cracks are appearing in the public health lobby’s support for new bans on vaping — revealing that, even in a notoriously prohibitionist sector, there is concern the Albanese government’s ridiculous “crackdown” on e-cigarettes simply won’t work.

After railing against the evil tobacco industry in March, Health Minister Mark Butler used the budget to announce a plan to “stamp out vaping”, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. He promised to stop the import of non-prescription vapes, reduce the use of flavours and colours, ban single-use vapes, and force them to be packaged like pharmaceuticals.

July 04, 2023 by smh.com.au

Australia’s world-first blanket ban on vaping without a prescription will make the problem worse, according to experts from the Australian National Advisory Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs, who debated how to warn the health minister about their misgivings in emails published under freedom of information.

Private correspondence among members of the government advisory body, which provides confidential advice to the health minister, shows some were alarmed when they learnt the Therapeutic Goods Administration was considering a harsher crackdown on vaping.

June 30, 2023 by napwha.org.au

This article starts on a hopeful note, however, even when we consider that only 75% of this subsample report that they are daily smokers, this still places people with HIV at a considerably higher rate than everyone else (an estimated 10.7% of the Australian population over 18 are daily smokers).

Living with HIV can lead to ways of managing stress and we all know that tobacco smoking is one of them.  We also know how difficult it can be for some people to give up cigarettes and we have known for many years the links between cardiovascular disease, smoking and HIV (read more). Both Living Positive Victoria and Queensland Positive People have run support programs for just this reason.

June 20, 2023 by abc.net.au

The Legalise Cannabis party has today introduced bills to legalise marijuana for personal use in parliaments in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. It is the first time the same bill has been tabled in three states on the same day.

The bills have been introduced to the states' upper houses and will need support from major parties to become law.

It will not allow people under 18 to access cannabis, or permit driving while impaired by the drug.

New South Wales upper house MP Jeremy Buckingham said the reform would allow people over the age of 18 to grow up to six cannabis plants in their households.

June 08, 2023 by abc.net.au

A crackdown on the sale of e-cigarettes throughout South Australia has secured the support of an Adelaide mum, who has spoken out about the impact of vaping addiction on her two youngest children. The SA government is introducing new licensing conditions on vaping products and a two-month "enforcement blitz" to stamp out the illegal sale of nicotine vapes, which are increasingly being accessed by young people.

The new conditions will be an interim measure, ahead of a federal government plan to ban vapes and stop the importation of non-prescription e-cigarettes.

June 05, 2023 by youtube.com

"The prescription model that was introduced in 2020 on any metric has to be noted as a massive failure.
Why should we have any faith that the same people that were totally wrong about 2020 reforms would be right about the 2023 reforms?
I said at the time it would lead to a massive growth in the black market.
Maybe this will be taught in future lessons how not to create policy because I would have thought that before making a major policy decision in Australia that good policy practices would mean looking at other similar, models around the world, such as NZ. How can you justify not doing that basic work before a gov makes a serious decision here? [...]

May 30, 2023 by skynews.com.au

Cancer Council Victoria CEO Todd Harper has expressed his concern over the prevalent use of vapes and how Australia needs to prevent a “generation of addicts”.

“We need to be very careful about chemicals like this being inhaled into our lungs,” Mr Harper told Sky News Australia.

May 24, 2023 by smh.com.au

The head of the Australian Border Force says the government’s plan to abolish retail vape sales is a “work in progress” with no funding attached to the crackdown in this month’s federal budget.

Commissioner Michael Outram warned that banning vapes at the border won’t be enough to stamp out a rampant black market, as his organisation was already only managing to detect a quarter of illicit drugs making their way into Australia. “The level of criminal infiltration at our border is concerning,” Outram told a senate estimates hearing on Tuesday. “Prohibition [of] goods at the border, in itself, is unlikely to solve a problem.”