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Further implications
The most influential of Australia's public health authorities are generally opposed to the use of e-cigarettes, being unconvinced of its supposed benefits as part of a treatment regime to help tobacco smokers give up smoking and wary of the health risks that e-cigarettes pose in their own right. Of particular concern is the risk e-cigarettes can pose to young users.
When the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport releases its report on the use and marketing of e-cigarettes in Australia some time in 2018, it seems unlikely that the present limitations will be lifted. Currently, e-cigarettes can only be imported into Australia for personal use, in limited quality, with a medical prescription, as part of treatment to have a patient give up smoking. Nicotine is designated a poison in Australia and its importation, production or sale is prohibited.
All that seems likely to occur is that regulations may be tightened regarding the strength of the nicotine concentrates that can be imported. It is also possible that there will be formal regulation of e-cigarettes that do not contain nicotine in response to suggestions that they also contain substances that can be harmful.
Australia has been highly successful in reducing the number of tobacco smokers. Daily smokers as a share of the Australian population aged over 14 has fallen from 25 per cent in the early 1990s - when federal and state government launched a series of National Tobacco Campaigns to discourage smoking - to 12.2 per cent in 2016, while the share of casual smokers has halved to 5.2 per cent.
However, an immediate rejection of e-cigarettes in Australia is unlikely to mark the end of the argument. Findings released in August, 2017, indicate that for the first time since anti-smoking campaigns ramped up a generation ago, the number of smokers in Australia has increased. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, found the number of smokers fell by 317,000 between 2010 and 2013 but rose 21,100 in the three years to 2016. An unexpected standstill in the national smoking rate since 2013, combined with rapid population growth, has pushed up the number of regular smokers by more than 21,000 to 2.4 million. Also of concern is that the smoking rate among Australia's youth does not seem to be maintaining its decline. The latest smoking rates for over-18s in the United States and Britain, 15.1ð and 15.8 per cent respectively - are similar to or lower than in Australia, which has historically had significantly lower smoking rates.
In this context, the debate surrounding e-cigarettes in Australia is only likely to become more heated over time. For supporters of e-cigarettes, the product is likely to be seen as a measure that could arrest the current stall in Australia's previously declining consumption of tobacco cigarettes. For their opponents, liberalising access to e-cigarettes is likely to be seen as a measure which may only make things worse - bringing health risks of its own, while possibly leading to increased tobacco smoking among the young.