In his draconian crackdown on vaping, announced on Tuesday, Labor Health Minister Mark Butler characterised his new policy as addressing a ‘threat to public health’.

In truth, he was addressing a threat to the public health establishment.

Back in November, announcing a government review of vaping policy, saying ‘nothing was off the table’. For a moment, it seemed that common sense might trump zealotry.

But the public health establishment, and their besotted bureaucrats, reined Butler in. The result: a vaping regime more draconian than anything vaguely anticipated, even as cannabis-smoking, ecstasy, and even heroin are either legalised or unofficially tolerated. Party drug testing and safe injecting rooms, okay…? Responsible adult nicotine vaping, never!

These panjandrums, pooh-bahs, and prudes are the real controllers of public health policy in Australia, not ministers and elected politicians. The latter and their bureaucrats listen to the pooh-bahs. They take every pooh-bah pronouncement as gospel. They don’t question the veracity and accuracy of assertions the pooh-bahs make – because it is the pooh-bahs making them.

So, when these pooh-bahs cherry-pick evidence and make sweeping assertions, they not only get away with it. They are lauded, celebrated, and garlanded with gongs and honours.

Thus Butler, following Liberal Greg Hunt before him, announces a de facto ban on vaping and vaping devices, intended to make them unobtainable not just by young people, but by almost everyone.

Take one point in Butler’s media blitz. He says that multiple chemical analyses of the products have found vapes contain 200 toxic chemicals that do not belong in the lungs, ‘the same chemicals you’ll find in nail polish remover and weed killer’.

That statement parrots the line of public health activists, that the mere presence of a chemical or other substance is justification for draconian government action.

But look more closely. It’s actually a matter of quantity as well. How many of those substances are present in the ambient environment, the polluted air that we breathe? More specifically, if vaping is being chained to tobacco smoking, how much of these substances are also present in tobacco smoke, and are they present in much smaller quantities by comparison?

Such inconvenient but intellectually honest distinctions mean nothing to the public health lobby. Like most zealots, they may mean well, but because they utterly believe in their own rightness they have no compunction about spinning like tops to drive their prohibitionist cause, and no one dares challenge them.

Even when it makes Australia an outlier on the world public health stage. Respected medical authorities, notably the UK’s Royal College of Physicians, conclude that vaping is a far, far lesser threat to health than smoking, at least 95 per cent safer. That conclusion has underpinned the adoption of regulated nicotine vaping as a widely-accessible retail alternative to cigarettes in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, among other Western and, increasingly, Asian countries.

The Australian public policy challenge on vaping is both positive and negative. Positive, in that we all want to reduce, if not eliminate, smoking, and vaping can make a real difference to the long-term health and life expectancy of adult smokers determined to get their nicotine fixes. Negative, in that there is a real and genuine problem with youth vaping, just as there is a real and genuine problem with youth smoking.

The very significant falls in smoking rates in the countries mentioned above since vaping was accepted and promoted as an alternative, tell us that vaping has more than a merely useful role to play in beating the scourge of tobacco. Rejecting it out of hand is not just unwise, it’s downright foolish.

In response to Butler’s sweeping announcement, I repeat what I wrote here earlier this year, urging a rational, measured approach to a complex policy challenge:

• Instead of creating and expanding the nicotine vaping black market, make it open, transparent, and legal. Control the beast by making vaping a legitimate retail products for adults, sold openly as an alternative to smoking, just as nicotine gums and patches are. In short, allow regulated retail sales instead of treating it as a prescription-only product.
• Legalise nicotine for vaping in federal poisons regulation, just as that legislation currently allows nicotine in ‘tobacco prepared and packed for smoking’ – that is to say, far deadlier cigarettes.
• Impose regulatory controls over the quality of vaping solutions and devices, and the quantity of substances – not just nicotine – in solutions.
• Draw on the experiences of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and other comparable countries. Bring into Australia vaping policies and regulations that work there, and screen out what doesn’t.
• Provide public and philanthropic research funding to scientists and researchers on all sides of the vaping versus smoking issue.

But instead of even considering the sunlight of regulated legal access and sale, Butler has bowed to the ban first, ask no questions demands of the public health pooh-bahs. That it is proving to be a headline-grabber is, for him and the Albanese government, an added bonus.

What Butler has decided to do, however, will not crush or deter youth vaping. Rather, his measures make it more dangerous and glamorous an activity for rebellious teens. They will make it cooler.

Further, these vaping measures – plus the announced hefty year-by-year hike in already eye-watering tobacco excise that only serves to feed governments’ revenue addiction by taxing diehard smokers – will give a mighty boost to the very black market that the minister wants to eradicate. Flavoured vapes, with dangerous concentrations of nicotine, will proliferate, not disappear. There will be a stronger adult black market for them, criminalising adult users, as well as still targeting underage people out for a rebellious adventure. It will expose all users to dangerous, even deadly, hooch and homebrew on an even greater scale than now.

And smoking rates won’t fall. They will increase.

Understandably, Butler presents his anti-vaping measures as a public health triumph. But more likely, he and his activist cheer squad are kicking an own goal that will, in future years nicotine-stain their legacies. However well-meaning they are in their intent, they will, in time, regret their folly, and so will many thousands of smokers and legitimate vapers.

This draconian policy prescription is being made despite even tobacco companies demonstrating more intellectual honesty on vaping than public health activists. Think on that.

Terry Barnes has, in the past, advised vaping advocates and industry entities on related policy and regulatory issues

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