A Letter to Mark Butler MP: Australia’s Minister for Health

Mr Butler,

With respect I encourage you to read this through to the end, simply because your actions against the vaping and electronic cigarette industry in our country border on NARCISSISM.
Let me begin by reminding you that your education and career experience do NOT make you IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM qualified to make decisions regarding the health of anyone beyond your immediate family. Get out to the suburbs and actually talk face to face with the people of the vaping industry; you know, the ordinary Australians, many of whom whose businesses you have destroyed simply because you don’t know how to properly regulate sales of what is already a LEGAL DRUG…
all while you continue to let ‘Big Pharma’ sell in supermarkets a virtually identical (but much more toxic and less effective) product to children as young as twelve!

Here’s a fact for you:
60% of those Australians who voted for Labor at the last election either smoke tobacco or use an electronic cigarette of some kind on a daily basis.
I say this with all sincerity and bluntness: If you want them to vote for politicians who actually recognise that there’s a better way to solve this issue than by prohibition, you’re best to keep on ignoring the more than one million e-cig users in this country who are screaming at your government right now to act with civility and common sense by LEGALISING LIQUID NICOTINE VAPING NOW!

I quote your most recent public interview about Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) and retort:

“We are not as a government going to normalise this public health menace.”

Of course you’re not! Why is that a fact? Because you and yours are clueless, you’re taking advice from ALL BUT the very people your ridiculously outdated policy shifts are affecting and you’re blinded by the massive amounts of money the Treasury are losing! You simply cannot accept that an exponentially increasing number of Australians are choosing to quit smoking tobacco by means other than ineffective ‘Big Pharma’ Nicotine Replacement Therapies (patches, gums, mouth sprays and lozenges).

May I remind you that it’s Your Government who is perpetuating ‘this public health menace’. The purely Draconian prescription model implemented by (former) Health Minister Greg Hunt in October of 2021, added to this country’s extraordinary levels of taxation on tobacco products, are the prime creators of the flourishing ‘black markets’ for both illicit tobacco and ‘closed system’ electronic cigarettes, namely ‘disposable’ vapes and pre-filled ‘pod’ devices which, by the way, are NOT “marketed by big tobacco” anywhere in Australia…
simply because current regulations do not allow them to do so!
You need to start asking children to describe where they are getting the e-cigs they’re using, then immediately act against those illicit vendors. A ‘black market’ will fall silent once sellers of illegal products are put behind bars and fined out of existence. Again, blame for the proliferation of that ‘black market’ falls squarely on both State and Federal authorities who have sat on their hands and not bothered to investigate then prosecute illicit vendors.
YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR YOUR LACK OF ACTION IN THAT REGARD!

“it’s no coincidence that the people driving that agenda are tobac­co industry lobbyists because they know this is a pathway back to cigarettes”

Please understand that the tobacco industry are themselves producing electronic cigarettes so they can maintain profits while the world transitions AWAY FROM the deadliness of tobacco smoking! ‘Heat-not-burn’ devices are merely the tobacco industry’s way to keep selling cigarettes and the only reason they are now producing ‘closed system pod’ devices is because people are not interested in buying their carcinogenic garbage.

“(tobacco industry lobbyists) know this is a pathway around the strong action we’ve taken in recent decades to drive down smoking rates.”

Tobacco industry lobbyists are so accustomed to raking in billions of dollars each and every year that they have zero concern for the health of the human population. As for the “strong action” you’ve taken re: smoking rates? Nobody with any knowledge of mathematics or macroeconomics can possibly conclude that increasing the rate of taxation on tobacco products has worked to decrease the number of Australians who smoke by as much as bureaucrats and legislators since 2010 had envisaged. Up until the explosion of the electronic cigarette market in 2020, the ONLY reason smoking rates were slowly falling is that tobacco cigarette prices in this country have become the highest in the Western world; wholly due to successive tax increases. A packet of 40 cigarettes now retails anywhere above AU$50 with the cheapest 25 gram pouch of roll-your-own tobacco selling for that same price. In spite of these price hikes, Australia still lags way behind other developed nations with respect to smoking rates and how they have drastically fallen in those countries.
Why? Simply because for the last decade…
THE AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAVE BEEN MANAGING THE ISSUE OF TOBACCO HARM REDUCTION COMPLETELY THE WRONG WAY!

“Research only published this week by the Austral­ian National University confirms that you are three times more likely to take up smoking if you vape than if you don’t.”

Odd how they are one of a dwindling few scholastic institutions on the planet who still believes such ABSOLUTE DRIVEL! They certainly didn’t survey Me personally, nor did they contact anyone I know to determine whether their ridiculous notion was indeed accurate. Similar studies undertaken by institutions far larger than the ANU that arrived at a similar UTTERLY NONSENSICAL conclusion have been thoroughly debunked by a combination of proper research, common sense and actually talking to real world people who vape. Nobody in their right mind could possibly believe that a 19 year old who is spending $40 a week on devices which satisfy their nicotine cravings, taste like blueberry muffins, last for five days and are acceptable to their peers would then go to a tobacconist and pay $60 for a packet of cigarettes which satisfies their nicotine craving for just two days, tastes like horse manure with a foul odour to match and that their peers passionately hate!
Oh, and you can tell the numpties at the ANU that if they have the guts to argue the above point with me by detailing how they arrived at their outrageously incorrect summation, they need to drop me a line at:
terinmahsout@gmail.com

Just a brief sidenote about my own vape story: I smoked cigarettes for 36 YEARS before switching full time to nicotine vapes six years ago today 25th April 2023. I have not purchased a packet of cigarettes or pouch of tobacco since then, nor have I ever felt the desire to smoke. I personally know over 50 former smokers who can each tell a very similar tale to mine and over the last decade there have been millions of stories like it which have been shared on every social media platform on the internet, both here in Australia and across the globe.

“That’s why the tobacco industry is such a supporter of vaping. It’s a pathway back. It’s a way of creating a new generation of nicotine addicts.”

Again, not true! There are statistics available from all over the world which PROVE that what you claim is SIMPLY NOT HAPPENING! Get it through your thick skull…
VAPING IS NOT CREATING A NEW GENERATION OF NICOTINE ADDICTS!!!
Again, statistics and survey results prove that you are WRONG!

It is YOUR GOVERNMENT and the Therapeutic Goods Administration who are turning this whole issue into a disgusting mess, by
1. refusing to re-classify nicotine in both base and salt forms as a medicinal product in the EXACT SAME WAY that Canada, the United Kingdom, America and New Zealand have (the TGA are effectively saying that authorities in those countries are stupid);
2. refusing to place freebase/salt liquid nicotine and associated products in the very same retail category as that currently applied to ‘Nicabate’ and ‘Nicorette’ nicotine replacement therapy products (all which contain liquid nicotine) that children as young as twelve years old can buy from their local supermarket without requiring either proof of age or doctor’s prescription;
3. not properly regulating nor even attempting to prevent minors from being able to purchase products which contain nicotine (the number of online vendors, convenience stores, illicit ‘vape shops’ and petrol stations still selling disposable vape devices to this very day pays testament to that);
4. placing all electronic cigarettes into one category whilst there are marked differences between manufacturing quality of vaping methods, user safety, included toxic chemical compounds and ability to re-use/recycle the products;
5. not taking into consideration the mental health of the Australian public, and
6. failing to properly educate the community about tobacco harm reduction methods, especially when call centre staff at ‘Quitline’ have been directed not to include information about liquid nicotine vaping in their advice to smokers.

Mark, it’s high time you understood that you are both out of your depth and completely out of touch with reality when it comes to the issue of nicotine vaping in this country. Your sheer ignorance of your colleagues in New Zealand, America, the United Kingdom and Canada is staggering beyond belief; also, your blind adherence to debunked studies, misinformation, falsified data and ‘facts’ which have long since been disproven is disgraceful at best. Regulations MUST be written to allow Australian adults the same freedoms availed to citizens of those countries above, namely the ability to purchase freebase or salt nicotine over-the-counter for use with safe, properly manufactured electronic cigarette devices. Either that or kill off the Prime Minister‘s desire to “bring manufacturing back to Australia” while watching what could easily be a billion-dollar industry miss its opportunity as a ‘black market’ runs rampant, dodges tax obligations and distributes dangerously toxic products to an uneducated yet long-suffering Australian public. Ask yourself, how good would it be if Australian owned businesses grew tobacco and other plants to produce both liquid nicotine and high quality non-toxic ‘e-liquids’ to Australian and New Zealand Food Safety standards then sold them to the world?

Here endeth the lesson.

With thanks to Hairy™