Former Australian senator David Leyonhjelm (“ Vaping ban will not help stamp out smoking ”, May 21) gets everything wrong in his letter, parroting every argument made by Big Tobacco. Australia today has the lowest adult and youth smoking rates ever recorded and remains in the forefront of nations with low rates, despite it being illegal to possess vapable nicotine without a prescription. Ten reviews published since 2017 have concluded that the evidence on the effectiveness of vaping for quitting smoking is weak. With a majority of vapers still smoking, vaping arguably keeps many smokers smoking rather than tipping them out. The paper that Public Health England relied on for its magic number of vaping being 95 per cent less harmful stated this: “A limitation of this study is the lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products on most of the criteria.” In science, caveats don’t get more fundamental than that. If one in five of all cigarettes smoked in Australia are illegally sourced, why is it that smokers find it so easy to find outlets selling them but the police can’t? In a country like Australia which has very low corruption, perhaps such estimates are not at all accurate. In most nations where the vaping genie is out of the bottle, it heads straight for teenagers who are often not smokers. As the tobacco industry knows, nicotine-addicted children are its future. Teen vaping rates skyrocket and governments frantically rush about trying to put the genie back in the bottle. We all know how successful that usually is. Simon Chapman AO, emeritus professor of public health, University of Sydney
