Vaping has become one of Australia’s biggest public health problems, with children as young as 14 taking up e-cigarettes.
New research by the Australian National University is being used to back a call for a government crackdown on access to e-cigarettes.
Vaping is frequently framed as a better option than smoking cigarettes but the report identified a throng of risks, including unintended poisoning.
Lead research Professor Emily Banks said that our lungs are designed to breathe fresh air and that people using vapes were inhaling a complex cocktail of chemicals.
More than 240 chemicals were found in the toxicological analysis of non-nicotine e-cigarettes. That compares to about 7,000 chemicals in traditional cigarettes.
The report said that users of nicotine e-cigarettes could also be poisoned by the nicotine itself.
According to Cancer Council Victoria, nicotine poisoning can cause seizures and respiratory depression, which can result in death.
Australians can only legally access nicotine vapes if they have a prescription to use the products for the purpose of stopping smoking, but the absence of strong law enforcement against the illegal sale of e-cigarettes is threatening Australia’s hard-fought tobacco control successes, a Cancer Council spokesperson said.
Council chair Anita Dessaix said that every state and territory government must crack down on the hundreds of retailers illegally selling e-cigarette products outside of pharmacies, under the noses of authorities.
The report also found that most uses of e-cigarettes were not for smoking cessation, since most smokers who vape continued to smoke, and most uses in young people weren’t about stopping smoking.
More than one-third of e-cigarette users in Australia are under 25, with 11 per cent of the population aged 14 and over-reporting e-cigarette use in 2019.
The Australian Medical Association is urging the government to clamp down, giving the increasing use of vapes by children.
AMA president Professor Steve Robson said that Australian governments need to act now and that this would help them start to tackle the issue of vapes being marketed and sold to children.
At least 32 countries prohibit the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes, 79 countries permit them to be sold while fully or partly regulating them and the remaining 84 countries do not regulate them at all.
The study was published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
Of course, the science is there, but apply a bit of common sense because breathing anything into your lungs other than that rare commodity of fresh air isn’t going to be beneficial to your health, including car fumes and other harmful substances that we breathe in every day on our travels.
Eventually, hospitals will be plagued with people suffering damage from these chemicals.
What should happen is that people should be armed with information on what’s in the vapes and then let people decide if they want to poison their bodies because to be honest, in the real world everything that we breathe in and eat is bad for us.
Every human will die of something or another, whether it be nicotine, alcohol or drugs as an alternative to boring natural causes.
However, we as a society believe it’s okay to tell others what to do. Nonetheless, as long as you’re not breaking the law, people should be allowed to just get on with it, but governments won’t allow that and the world is turning into the Truman Show, or even worse, Hunger Games.
Manufacturers know they’re adding addictive substances to vapes, just like they do with cigarettes, so why aren’t they held accountable for essentially poisoning people?
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