More than 25,000 allegedly illegal vapes have been seized in a police raid on a store in central Melbourne in a crackdown aimed at sending a “clear message” to other shops.
But public health experts say that without tighter border controls, stores will continue to trade illegal nicotine vape products aimed at teenagers.
The federal government in April promised to clamp down on the vaping black market with import controls and a ban on non-prescription vapes, but it has not announced when the reforms will be brought in.
Victoria police said more than 25,000 nicotine vapes and 2,500 packets of allegedly illegal tobacco cigarettes were seized during a raid on a business on Swanston Street on Tuesday evening. The items were worth about $800,000, police said.
“We will continue to focus on actively disrupting this activity,” Sgt Matt Jerabek said.
“This should send a very clear message to anyone in the city thinking of selling items illegally for an easy dollar.”
The Melbourne raid follows a statewide crackdown in South Australia, where 1,200 vapes suspected of containing nicotine were taken off the shelves of stores in the first four days of an operation that started earlier this month.
As part of the “enforcement blitz”, SA health department officers are inspecting businesses that sell vapes to check that licence holders are abiding by the law.
The Western Australian government has also started cracking down on the products, recently intercepting a truck travelling from New South Wales that was carrying 17,000 nicotine vapes.
Becky Freeman, a senior lecturer in public health at the University of Sydney, said that while it was positive to see the states were working to enforce the laws on vapes, they were fighting an uphill battle without federal help at the border.
“There are all these shops selling vapes and enforcement is time-consuming and expensive,” she said.
“What we need is for the federal government to let us know when they’re going to enact the reforms they proposed.”
It is illegal to buy vapes containing nicotine anywhere in Australia without a valid prescription, but the market has so far been poorly regulated.
The health minister, Mark Butler, announced in May that he would be taking strong action on the black market for vapes. The government plans to ban the importation of all vaping products except to pharmacies, restrict flavours and reduce the allowed nicotine concentrations, among other reforms.
Freeman said the policy was widely supported by health experts but it was unclear when it would be implemented.
It is already illegal to sell vapes to people under 18, but stores and online retailers flout these regulations by falsely selling nicotine-containing products as “nicotine-free”.
Freeman said a major challenge in enforcement at present was that it was very difficult to determine which vapes contained nicotine and which didn’t.
“That’s just a losing situation because the only way you can tell the difference between nicotine and non-nicotine is if you test them in the lab.”
