Ban challenged

After a recent court ruling, it is now illegal to sell these in WA, using the law enacted to prevent the sale of lolly cigarettes to children.

I was a heavy smoker for 33 years and had lost hope of ever being able to quit. However, from the day started using one of these devices, over a year ago, I lost interest in smoking and can no longer stand the taste or smell of them.

This is nothing less than a miracle for me.

Even the Health Department agrees e-cigarettes are orders of magnitude safer than cigarettes and there are now more than three million people in Europe and the UK using them in place of smoking. The research is piling up and yet, not finding anything of concern about their safety and efficacy.

I am furious that the Health Department is trying to take away my right to access a less harmful product while an extremely harmful one is still legal.

They are concerned that this technology may “re-normalise” smoking and encourage young people to smoke. Again, how can something proved to be 100 times safer than cigarettes be a threat to reducing smoking rates in this country?

Surely, the health of the remaining 15 per cent of the population who have been unable or unwilling to quit is not totally irrelevant: or is it a threat to the billions we contribute in tax revenue that is unsettling them?

They also cite fears of more people, particularly youth, becoming addicted to nicotine as a reason for the ban.

Nevertheless, our supermarket and chemist shelves are full of nicotine gum, nicotine lozenges, nicotine inhalers (which, by the way, contain far more worrying ingredients than e-cigarettes), which are all marketed to us with the assurance that it is not nicotine that is dangerous in cigarettes.

How does this make sense?