Select Committee on Tobacco Harm Reduction Department of the Senate PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600
[email protected] November 4th, 2020 A Name-Withheld Submission to The Select Committee on Tobacco Harm Reduction Dear Committee Members, I am currently a regular vaper who successfully used vaping to quit smoking tobacco cigarettes about four years ago. I am male, 58 years of age and happily married with three adult children in their early twenties. Like many of my generation, at a youthful 13 years of age, I picked up a tobacco smoking habit that was considered very sophisticated and grown up at the that time. The committee will of course be aware that smoking was still very widespread from the 1950s to the late 1980s until the manufacturer’s outright fraudulent defence and dangers of this product started to attract the attention of Health & Legal Regulators around the world. In 1995 on the birth of my first daughter I stopped drinking alcohol on a whim and felt great. This was instant and easy to do and has certainly contributed to my good health in my late 50s along with sensible diet and light exercise. Shortly after this I made my first attempt at quitting smoking and this was to be a pattern that would be repeated many times from 1995 through to 2016. Throughout this period I used every method from cold turkey, champix, gum, patches and hypnotism. The experience of attempting to quit tobacco was completely different to quitting drinking. The addictive urges were far stronger, the triggers were more powerful and the habitual sensation of a cigarette between the fingers, the drawback and exhale as well as the olfactory appeal of smelling cigarette smoke amazingly held a vice like grip into my brain pleasure centres.