#4 The legalities of vaping in Australia
I am at that charming age as a woman where someone asks me my age I can wryly tell them that I am “old enough” but it is also the age where you need to start getting serious about your life and your health. I wanted to give up smoking cigarettes and so I looked into e-cigarettes to help me give up smoking, but I didn't realize that doing so could make me a criminal in different parts of the country.
You see each Australian State and Territory classes Electronic Cigarettes and Nicotine differently, and I was lucky because I live in SA where e-cigarettes are unclassed, vaping itself is legal and the importation of nicotine is legal. So I bought a vape pen on Ebay and imported the Nicotine from a company recommended to me by a friend, and I was set, but if I was in a different Australian jurisdiction what I did could be illegal- yikes!
Approximately two-thirds of the people that smoke will die from it, or by related illnesses, and so smoking cessation is an important topic. It is so frustrating that e-cigarettes which albeit are still not good for you, but are less dangerous than a traditional cigarette which has a plethora of added chemicals and poisons, are illegal in some Australian jurisdictions (a link to a table showing the laws in different Australian jurisdictions can be found here).
In my quest to give up smoking I found that using an e-cigarette helped with both the physical withdrawals and psychological symptoms of smoking cessation. The added bonus is that there are so many different flavours available to choose from, so I wasn't restricted in choice to a tobacco flavour per se (I decided on coffee, chocolate and cola flavours- yum).
While legislators dally, more and more people are suffering under the yoke of addiction, when e-cigarettes could be used as a smoking cessation tool, just like I did. It makes me so mad to think that e-cigarettes which are far safer than cigarettes are not freely available, when cigarettes are so easy to buy from any corner shop. It is time for legislators to get serious about their constituents health and legislate e-cigarettes properly so that they can be as freely available as cigarettes.
Disclamer: I'm not vaping only because my ecig is broken ;)
I am not a big smoker, but I do smoke sometimes especially if I've already had a few beers. I also enjoy vaping and the best side of it is that you could do it indoors in places where you couldn't otherwise smoke and around non-smokers.
But I'd also like to point something out, the dangers of vaping have not been fully evaluated yet. It seems that it's safer than smoking, but I'm sure we can say it with full certainty despite the fact that it's quite likely for this to be the case.
As mentioned before, I'm not really a big smoker (I probably get through just 2 packs a month) and I also don't vape that much and I don't plan to stop either, I'll just continue to abuse my body in moderation. ;)
You are right, the dangers of vaping haven't been talked about much ,but as you say, it is still better than smoking. Personally I have gone from a pack a day smoker to vaping semi-regularly so I am quite enamored with vaping as a tool in smoking cessation.
Sure, it can be very useful but only in the hands of people that are actually determined to stop. I've seen many people picking up vaping and not diminishing their smoking significantly enough. And putting their ecig in a drawer and going back to good-old nicotine exclusively...
So good on you for smoking less even if you got some help from this tool!
True but I also have another motivation, my mum has copd and is on oxygen...I could see that in my future too, so no more cigs for me!
That piece of motivation sounds pretty convincing...
Quite honestly it scares the willies off me....I am very like my mother and the likelihood of me heading down the same path was pretty high...so I HAD to quit ...