Wednesday, 18 March 2020

Cigarette additives

Dr READ (Brunswick) (2292)

My adjournment matter is addressed to the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is for the minister to ban both filter ventilation and filter crush balls, along with flavourings, added to the tobacco and other additives such as organic acids (which help ‘smooth’ nicotine), in all cigarettes sold in Victoria.

Advertising bans, health warnings, quit programs and taxes have all contributed to the fact that almost 90 per cent of Victorians do not smoke. But the rate of decline has begun to slow.

Cigarettes have been engineered over recent decades to taste smoother and to hide the bitterness and harshness of nicotine, which would otherwise deter people from smoking.

Filter ventilation dilutes the mainstream smoke with air introduced through holes around the filter. It is the single most important means to make the smoke milder and easier on the throat and chest. Flavouring additives mask the unpleasant sensations of smoking by enabling the industry to ‘fine-tune’ flavour and aroma. Other tobacco additives like organic acids bind with nicotine to convert it to a non-irritating form until it is down in the lungs. Recently ‘crush balls’ have been used to carry flavourings in many Australian brands. These are crushed by the smoker when lighting up the cigarette and release a range of flavour additives. They appeal to young experimenters, helping them tolerate smoking until they become nicotine dependent and on the path to becoming long-term daily smokers.

Work by Ron Borland, Bill King and colleagues at the Cancer Council Victoria and more recently at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at Melbourne University has contributed to the growing evidence that cigarette engineering makes it harder for existing smokers to quit because it enables the tobacco industry to hide from smokers some of the most valuable sensory evidence that they are harming themselves.

Some of the most vulnerable and hardest to reach groups in our society are over-represented among smokers. They include those with chronic mental illness and people in the lowest socio-economic groups. Smoking rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are over three times the national average of non-Indigenous people. Education campaigns and medical advice have had less impact in these groups.

To reduce smoking prevalence below 10 per cent, so that all Victorians can enjoy the improved health resulting from not smoking, we need the kind of foresight and leadership displayed by state and federal Victorian ministers of the past, who saw the evidence and were prepared to act. I am thinking of David White and John Cain in the 1980s and Nicola Roxon more recently.

We need to say to tobacco companies that they can no longer sugar-coat their toxic product.