E-Cigarettes Are Banned In Australia?

Apart from a few improbable references to the possibility of death by nicotine overdose – which applies to ANY and ALL products containing nicotine – the only reason the e-cigarette is not yet legal is because:

“To date, no application has been
made to include electronic cigarettes on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods.”

The same possibility of overdose apply to aspirin, alcohol or even oxygen for Christ’s sake.

Anyone concerned by ‘second-hand’ nicotine ingestion should take a pill. Seriously. That warning applies ONLY to the carcinogens present in second-hand smoke, not nicotine itself.

The URL to the the NDPSC’s *reasons* can be found here. Perform a search on “e-cigarette” to find the relevant passges within the PDF.

http://www.tga.gov.au/NDPSC/record/rr200810.pdf

Easy solution – put a rule in place at your pub, club, or wherever that says _all_ smokers must smoke outside, including e-cigarette smokers.

It isn’t as if clubs and pubs don’t have any number of equally random rules about what can and cannot be done or worn on or brought onto the premises.

“Cigarettes have been around forever. We know what they do to people”

To some extent. We don’t actually know what most of the chemicals in them are, or what effects those chemicals alone have on human physiology. We do know that eliquid contains propylene glycol/vegetable glycerin/distilled water, nicotine and flavouring. Testing done by the University of Minnesota also found trace amounts of carcinogenic TSNAs (pretty much impossible to have nicotine without trace amounts of these chemicals unless it is created synthetically instead of extracted from tobacco, and I don’t think the technology for that exists yet) – at levels lower than nicotine gum or patches, which are in turn around 500 times lower than the concentration of these chemicals in the average cigarette.

“But e-cigarettes are new and not an established, accepted means of nicotine delivery yet.”

So lets ban them before they get to that point? I know a certain Mr P. Morris (and his friend Mr P. Stuyvesant) who couldn’t agree with you more.

“There are good questions to be asked. What effect does inhaling propylene glycol have on the lungs long-term?”

Ask someone with asthma. It’s a major component of the mixture in inhalers.

“E-cigarettes don’t burn down like ordinary cigarettes – conceivably you can just keep inhaling until you need to recharge them.”

Conversely, you can have one or two puffs instead of feeling (however trivially) invested in the task of finishing the smoke, or at least smoking most of it before throwing it away because otherwise it’s a waste.

“How much risk of nicotine overdose is there?”

Not a completely invalid point – I actually screwed up ordering my first lot of nicotine juice because I had based my math off the old mg values that used to be printed on the side of the packs, and I thought ‘OK, people on the net say the cartridge I used gives the same number of puffs as 6 cigarettes, and the mg number I smoked when they took the mg numbers off the packets was either 8mg or 6mg, so I need six times that’. A few puffs that made me feel like the back of my throat was falling apart later and I went back to google to find out that the mg value that I remembered being marked on the pack back in the day was the tar content and the nicotine content is generally only 0.5mg- 1.5mg per smoke. Would be nice if sites selling nicotine juice made that fact a little more obvious – but as it is illegal for Australian companies to sell nicotine juice, the government can’t really require foreign companies to alter how they do things to better suit us. So in summary – an easy mistake to make once. An easy mistake to notice that you’ve made, because your throat hurts like hell. An easy mistake to verify via google and rectify. For someone to smoke the three full cartridges of maximum concentration nicotine ejuice (equivalent of two full packs) required to provide a fatal dose in the timeframe required (presumably quite short, as while my habit didn’t get past the point of one 20pk on a daily basis, I did have somewhat sizeable nights out drinking where I went through two twenty packs and part of a third. So the lethal dose quoted needs to be taken in less than a four to six hour period to in fact be lethal. Seems like there’s quite a big of headroom there and actually managing to overdose from nicotine in this manner would be very much Darwin award material.

“These kinds of valid questions need to be answered before we approve e-cigarettes.”

I have. I approve them. Pity my approval doesn’t count in the same way a MPs does. To be honest, I think the more pressing concern for them is how to sell the Australian public on tax increases to compensate for lost revenue due to fewer people spending $90/wk or more on highly-taxed cigarettes.

“If they are proven to be safe and an effective aid to quitting smoking then sure, approve them, especially as a nicotine replacement therapy. But we don’t know that yet.”

I do. Got mine three weeks ago. Used it a little with no-nicotine juice to get used to it, then when the nicotine juice turned up, finished my current pack of smokes, filled up my cartridges and off I went. First day was hell, every time I took it out I seemed to be puffing for longer and even while I was doing that I couldn’t stop thinking about going into the nearest convenience store and getting a pack (honestly kind of amazed I didn’t – can only put it down to my determination to give the ecigarette a serious try for at least a day – but that kind of willpower is very hard for a nicotine addict to maintain over any protracted period. I’ve been very serious about not smoking before and not been able to get through a day without buying a pack – even with the help of nicotine gum). Wasn’t until I got home that I realised I’d actually administered an impromptu blind test on myself – when I ordered my nicotine juice, I also ordered plain juice to dilute it/the flavoured juice if needed, and *that* is what I managed to fill my cartridges with when I was in a rush to leave for work and not really paying attention to what I was doing. In my defence, the bottle the plain juice is in is identical to the bottle the nicotine juice is in, and the plain juice has nicotine written on the label (albeit in the sentence “Used for diluting nicotine juice”), while the bottle with nicotine in it doesn’t (just has the concentration).
Anyhow, put the real stuff in, the next day thought two or three times about buying a pack of real cigarettes (but this time it was more focussed around the differences in sensation between the two – how the warmer smoke felt coming into my mouth, the act of ashing, the sound of crackling as you draw on a smoke, even the feel of your skin burning a little if you hold on too long while a cigarette burns right down – not the feeling of having nicotine in my system, because I actually did), but nowhere near as seriously as the previous day. Day after barely thought about it at all. Now after eight days without a cigarette the only time I think about it is when I get asked about quitting.
So yeah, as far as I’m concerned they are a very effective aid towards quitting. I stopped smoking, spent a day without nicotine feeling….well….not great to say the least, then started (properly) with the e-cigarette, and really can’t see myself going back.
On the safety question – without the studies, it is impossible to know per se. The studies done so far seem to compare *non-smokers* who have and haven’t recently used e cigarettes, rendering them pretty useless. Sure, if you take someone with no nicotine in their system and compare them to someone with nicotine in their system, the blood flow constriction is going to result in some measureable difference in perceived fitness level. Kind of a no brainer. Come back when you’ve done a study comparing smokers of similar initial health/fitness levels who have received X mg of nicotine from cigarettes over the last two days and who have received X mg of nicotine, but only from e-cigarettes. Or better yet, try the first study but with nicotine gum, or patches instead of e-cigarettes. Oh dear, they reduce the number of stairs a non-smoker can run up without getting puffed as well? Better ban them too hadn’t we….. . So basically we have studies saying that nicotine is bad. Great. Not news. The only pertinent fact for a smoker is whether the other chemicals present in cigarettes are also bad, and I think the verdict is kind of in on that one.
But whether or not we can be medically certain that e-cigarettes do not present any significant health risk, it is hard to believe that a liquid whose most mysterious ingredient is used as a common food additive and in smoke machines and asthma nebulizers could be dangerous. But if Propylene Glycol is really that scary there is an alternative option in the form of the completely natural Vegetable Glycerin (extracted from coconut oil). PG tends to be preferred as it enhances flavour transmission, but if someone has for instance an allergy to PG (and, with its ubiquity in foodstuffs it is highly unlikely that that would not find out about that before they reached the age where they were considering trying to *quit* smoking) VG works for the most part as well.
So – no proof anything in the liquid other than the nicotine has adverse health effects. Nicotine in the form of cigarettes is available in every newsagency, supermarket, convenience store and petrol station across the country, but we don’t want to know about e-cigarettes because we have not yet performed the extensive testing and research on the ingredients and effects that we did before normal cigarettes were approved for sale?

” I reckon the TGA has done the right thing in banning them until we know more about these things (especially as most of them come from Asian factories which may not follow the same health & safety regulations as we do).”

I reckon the TGA hasn’t banned them (the only related ban in effect in Australia concerns the sale and/or marketing of nicotine juice *by* an Australian company or citizen). I hope they continue to refrain from being moronic enough to do so. And the cheap shot about the quality of manufacturing in Asia? “Yeah, my Iphone exploded again this week, had to go back and get another one” isn’t exactly something you hear all that often. Most computer components are manufactured in that region, and with all the hardware I’ve been through over the last two decades (a pretty decent amount) very few parts die during the 2-3 years I use them before replacing them with something faster. That’s complicated electronics, and they seem to do ok with that. I think they can manage to build a battery and a small heating element without completely screwing up. Kind of like worrying that a nuclear physicist might screw up explaining basic atomic particles to a class of young high school kids.

You hit the nail on the head mate, This is the only chance I have had over the last 40 years to actually give up the real things for good by using E-Cig’s and now the gov want to stop it ???

WAKE UP PEOPLE – GET ONTO FACEBOOK AND START SPREADING THE WORD ABOUT THIS…