Cape Town - Last November Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said he wanted to outlaw e-cigarettes.
“If it were up to me, I would outright ban electronic cigarettes and I will fight for it,” he told the Mail & Guardian.
“If there is one industry I don’t sympathise with at all it’s the tobacco industry, for the simple reason there is nothing they have contributed to humanity except great damage.”
Motsoaledi said South Africa had had great success in tobacco control, including taxing tobacco products, limiting their use in public and putting health warnings on packaging.
He said “the tobacco industry sidestepped this and came up with the electronic cigarette. And now they are saying they fall outside the ambit of tobacco regulation because they are not tobacco. We are not going to be fooled”.
“They are the absolute enemy of the health system. For instance, we will never get rid of tuberculosis as long as smoking is there. So why mustn’t we throw any punches back?”
South Africa officially regulates e-cigarettes as medicines, but experts say this is not enforced. The products are easily available outside pharmacies.
If South Africa regulated e-cigarettes as tobacco products, they would be subject to the same taxes and restrictions. “We want to regulate them in the same way we are regulating tobacco products,” said Motsoaledi.
Dr Yussuf Saloojee, executive director of the National Council Against Smoking, told the Cape Argus last year that the e-cigarette issue was cause for concern.
While there are fewer chemicals in the device, he said there hasn’t been enough research about e-cigarettes to declare them safe.
“Some of them do contain cancer-causing chemicals, but in very small quantities. They are probably safer than cigarettes, but the science isn’t in and we can’t say that for sure.”
Provincial Health Department spokesman Mark van der Heever said the department did not encourage the use of either regular or e-cigarettes.
Professor Richard van Zyl-Smit, head of lung clinical research at UCT’s Lung Institute, said nicotine in cigarettes or e-cigs can act as a tumour promoter.
Weekend Argus