Children are sleeping with vaping devices under their pillow because they are so addicted to nicotine they can’t get through the night without a hit, a hearing into tobacco reforms has heard.
Speaking on behalf of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (Racgp), Dr Hester Wilson said young people are being “inundated” with advertisements promoting vaping on social media and are grappling with nicotine addiction.
“I have one patient that I’m seeing at the moment who has a vape that he keeps under his pillow,” Wilson said on Wednesday at public hearings into amendments to the public health (tobacco and other products) bill.
“He wakes up during the night to have more inhalations of the vape. He puts his vape up his sleeve at school so that he can surreptitiously vape during class. He is seeking help for that and he’s finding it really difficult to make the change.”
In September, VicHealth and Quit released research revealing e-cigarette retailers are advertising vaping products on social media specifically designed for teenagers to easily hide from parents and teachers.
If the bill amendments pass, updated and improved graphic warnings will be added to tobacco packaging and included on individual cigarettes. The use of specified additives in tobacco products like menthols would also be banned.
New measures to discourage smoking and prevent the promotion of vaping and e-cigarettes would also be introduced, such as plain packaging on vapes.
The bill is separate to a series of reforms still being developed in collaboration between the state, territory and federal governments to crack down on the importation and sale of vapes, including banning non-nicotine products.
Wilson said the amendments to the bill should pass urgently, but said a further amendment should be made to ban tobacco and vaping industry donations to political parties and politicians.
This was echoed by the president of the NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Michael Bonning, who said all political parties must “stop accepting sponsorship gifts or political donations from the tobacco industry, as this clearly compromises government policy on public health matters”.
He said after seeing a decline in nicotine use for years, vaping had driven addiction up again.
“More and more young people are vaping and smoking after a prolonged decline in nicotine product use,” Bonning said.
“[There are] more smokers, more vapers, more chronic cough, new lung disease in young people … people who through their vapes are ingesting the equivalent of three-to-four packs of cigarettes per day, and with it the ingestion of other harmful chemicals and heavy metals which will impact their bodies over the coming years and decades.”
A study published on Wednesday in the International Journal of Drug Policy found that 45% of Australian adolescents are at risk of becoming vapers.
Led by Associate Prof Michelle Jongenelis at the University of Melbourne, the survey asked almost 1,000 12-to-17-year-olds who had never smoked or vaped about how curious they were about using e-cigarettes, how willing they were to use e-cigarettes and if they planned to try them in the next six months.
Attitudes and social norms were key factors found to be related to susceptibility. Those who believed e-cigarettes use is OK for people their age and who had at least one family member or close friend who vapes were also at risk.
“Our research showed that adolescents’ belief that vaping helps when you’re feeling angry, down or tense increased susceptibility to future vaping, but emerging evidence has actually linked vaping with depression in adolescents,” Jongenelis said.
“We also need to be doing more to protect our children from harmful industry advertising by introducing strict regulations on the online marketing of e-cigarettes.”
At hearings into the bill on Monday, the CEO of the Cancer Council Australia, Prof Tanya Buchanan, and the organisation’s chief policy officer, Dr Michelle Scollo, said they support the bill but wanted “loopholes” in it closed.
Scollo said while the legislation prohibits individuals from entering into sponsorships with the tobacco and vaping industries, it must also explicitly prohibit sponsorships of organisations and corporations.
“It would ensure that corporations such as football clubs were covered, and it will prevent athletes from using inventive corporate structuring in order to avoid the prohibition on sponsorship,” she said.
“If there are loopholes in a piece of legislation, we can be sure that they do get exploited.”
The hearings into amendments to the bill will conclude on Thursday, when representatives from the retail industry, the Department of Health and the police are expected to speak.
