The Department of Health is working on new measures to combat the way cigarettes are engineered.
This follows growing concerns that it is not only the ingredients in tobacco products that are highly dangerous, but also the way they are manipulated which makes the taste more appealing.
Minister for Health, Roger Cook said these included designing filters with special venting and ‘squeeze’ flavour capsules that could be crushed to release flavours that masked the chemical taste.
“As a result, young people trying them for the first time can more easily inhale without the harsh taste, and this can lead to quicker addiction and a considerably shorter and unhealthy lifetime of smoking,” Mr Cook said.
He said he was raising the concerns with Commonwealth, State and Territory Ministers for Health to investigate whether new laws were needed to control the composition and engineering of cigarettes.
“New measures to regulate the ingredients and design of tobacco products are seen as the next step in tobacco control and have been identified in key planning strategies,” Mr Cook said.
“Australia has been a world leader in tobacco control measures such as plain packaging, and last year the McGowan Government introduced a raft of laws, including several specifically aimed at reducing tobacco exposure in children.”
He said that while the fall in the number of Western Australian kids and teenagers smoking was encouraging, the tobacco industry was always looking for new ways to get them hooked and make it hard for them to quit.
“Requiring full disclosure of individual cigarette ingredients has been on the national tobacco control agenda in Australia for many years, and merits further consideration,” Mr Cook said.
“We cannot sit back on our laurels while we still have more than 1,500 Western Australians dying each year because they smoked, and we certainly don’t want any new generations of smokers,” the Minister said.
