Tobacco prohibition by stealth?
Over the past five decades, drug policy in Australia has been contested between two main groups: the prohibitionists, who aim to ban social drugs by criminalising users and consumers, and the Harm-Reductionists, practitioners in the field who take a less censorious line on drug use and aim to educate users on how to minimise the harms associated with drug use.
Due to the politicalisation of drugs policy by War-on-Drugs politicians like John Howard and Bjelke-Petersen, prohibitionists dominate State and Commonwealth Departments of Health, and the few victories of the Harm-Reductionists, such as injecting rooms, pill testing and the legalisation of medical cannabis, are the products of decades of advocacy.
One of the most influential advocates for Harm-Reduction in Australia has been Dr Alex Wodak. Now the Tobacco Harm Adviser to Harm Reduction Australia, Dr Wodak advocates for smoke-free tobacco consumption, such as vapes, as a non-carcinogenic alternative to cigarettes because the major cause of lung cancer in tobacco users is the tar in cigarettes.
“We’ve got four excellent ways of taking nicotine by smoke-free options,” says Dr Wodak. “In Australia we only talk about vaping. In Scandinavia, they talk about Snus. In many parts of the world, they’re talking about heated tobacco products, and then we’ve also got nicotine pouches.
“New Zealand and the UK have very intelligently had the sense to regulate vaping and their smoking rate has declined and they don’t have a black market in either of those countries for vapes, which Australia certainly has, so it’s possible to manage this transition much better than Australia has.”
Dr Wodak argues that, like other people who use drugs, tobacco users will switch to safer forms of nicotine use,........
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