Dr Murray Laugesen of Health N.Z. has just e-mailed me with his reply for posting on the board It appears below in full , the e-mail was entitled:
Victorian bans on non-medicinal nicotine inhalers-- salesban or more?
The issue is whether, as the Age reported 31 December 2008, possession and use of non-medicinal non-tobacco nicotine is illegal in the state of Victoria commencing 1 January 2009. Is this true? Has the Victorian government become nicotine-prohibitionist all of a sudden?
If so, non-medicinal nicotine for inhalation is now an illegal hard drug.
Yet smoking tobacco is sold on every street corner, and smokeless tobacco (snuff for sucking in inhaling up the nose) can still be imported for private use.
The way the system works, government classifies nicotine as either tobacco or medicine. If it is tobacco-free it must be a medicine! And if neither, it must be banned! What about backshed extraction of nicotine juice from tobacco for private use?
In NZ, people can still import nicotine privately for inhalation, and only the zero nicotine cartridges can be sold here along with the e-cigarette. Nicotine is a medicine. Anything else is permitted on a private basis.
However I was very shocked to read that its use and possession was banned. Is this true? If that is true, then private import would be banned. If you were to order some cartridges from the internet you would know the answer to this. Better, phone Customs today and tell them you want to order a months supply, and see if it is legal. Also look on the Customs website for Victoria. It may be there in black and white.
For smokeless tobacco Australia allows personal import I think, and charge duty. You may wish to contact
www.stag.org.au or Dave Fullarton
davef@teybros.com.au who runs the Smokeless Users group in Australia. Nicotine does not incur duty.
Once you have hard evidence that Nicotine for private use is being barred at the borders, then you have proof that nicotine is being treated as a HARD DRUG. You should contact your Civil Liberties Council if this is the case.
Meantime tobacco flows in duty-free with every incoming plane load.
Making nicotine into a hard drug would mean it was illegal to possess it, just like ...... and ........
Seriously, this would mean you would have to organise yourselves, contact the manufacturer for a e-mailing list of potential supporters (or supply him with text if he wants to keep the list confidential), and write the Age and invite others to contact you.
Many people would be against the ban on possession and use of nicotine.
Will caffeine be next? And all other addictive activity that makes the heart beat faster and raises the blood pressure for half an hour? Even the Seventh Day Adventist Church would surely not want their views on nicotine and caffeine imposed on the community by rule of law.
While not recommended for those with heart failure, because it increases heart rate and blood pressure for the next half hour, nicotine does NOT cause heart attacks (coronary thrombosis). Cigarette smoke does so, by stimulating platelets to join together to form a thrombus or clot in the artery. (The world expert on this topic is Professor Benowitz at San Francisco and this information is from his book Nicotine safety and toxicity).
Nicotine is safe . It was given to thousands of people for five years as nicotine gum, did not cause one death or hospitalisation compared with a control group. This famous US study is called the Lung Study.
E-cigarettes so far tested, show much less nicotine in their puff than does tobacco smoke. For the Ruyan electronic inhaler it is no more than 9% of what is in a tobacco puff.
I dont disagree with the TGA's wish to regulate and require e-cigarettes and nicotine cartridges be regulated, to ensure quality control on imported nicotine formulations for human consumption. Under the prevailing laws around the world, that usually means it has to be as a medicine.
But it is essential that Government does not prevent citizens from exercising their own risk assessments and importing nicotine for private inhalation if they so wish, until the cumbersome process of developing and registering a new medicine for sale under TGA rules can reach a successful conclusion. Mostly it won't, because of the huge costs for unsophisticated manufacturers in China.
Meantime you could take all or some of the following steps.
a) First establish the facts. Is nicotine is now a banned drug for private inhalation? Or not?
b) Talk to Melbourne Age and get them to check it out, so they realise the implications.
c) Phone up your radio station and get on to talk back and get people to understand.
I wonder if the government is keeping the antis happy with smoking in cars ban, and display in shops ban,while keeping industry happy with ban on the e-cigs.
If Egar.com has sold 10,000 ecigs in Vic, after launching its website in June 2008 (can you confirm that with the company?) then that's a lot of e-smokers going back on the tobacco.!!! That does not help the Tobacco Control Strategy.
I calculate that 10,000 ecigs equals about one percent of all smokers. If any cigarette maker could seize 1 percent of the market within 6 months he would be very pleased.
Cigarette smoking over time kills one in two smokers.
So if those 10,000 are still using their e-cigarettes, that is 5000 lives saved over time. 5000 lives saved equals the 6000 lives saved annually by the Quit Campaigns over the past 10 years in Victoria (according to Vic Health's website). Vic Health says $741 million has been saved over 10 years, so on that basis, e-cigarettes could soon be saving government some $74 million a year.
One could argue the numbers, but the principle remains - electronic nicotine inhalers reduce health harm and improve the economy and longevity.
Nonsmokers find it difficult to understand that a smoker only needs a certain amount of nicotine, and the body treats all nicotine molecules the same, whether from tobacco or nicotine inhalers.
I regard e-cigarettes as the lever to get rid of tobacco cigarettes (see
Untitled Document), and in New Zealand nicotine e-inhalers will over the next 10 years be part of the joint effort of all antismoking groups to end cigarette sales.
Keep tobacco smokers smoking, keep the tax revenue coming in.! I guess that is easiest, but the cigarette manufacturers will be pleased to have seen the Health Minister shut down a small but fast growing threat to their market share.
Also for clarification, ecigarettes are not the same as what Philip Morris was trying to sell last year, which was a tobacco cigarette, and ugly and ungainly to boot.
I have decided in the light of governments's action in Victoria, that I will stop calling them e-cigarettes and start calling them electronic nicotine inhalers. A change of terminology will I think help you in avoiding misunderstandings.
One suggestion I have is, just for now, forget trying to use the nicotine inhaler indoors, as this issue will win little sympathy, as it diverts attention from the main freedom you will wish to preserve right now - to buy nicotine on the internet from outside Victoria, for smoking in the privacy of your own car, home, and garden.
If the worst comes to the worst, other smokeless ways to get nicotine safely are found on
Untitled Document but nothing can compare right now to the convenience of the electronic nicotine inhaler.
Murray Laugesen QSO
public health physician
Health New Zealand Ltd.
