Dr. Marewa Glover has dedicated her life to helping people stop smoking in New Zealand. Her hard work has paid off. The country’s smoking rate has almost halved in just five years. The reason for the massive decrease is the availability of safer nicotine products like vapes, and government endorsement of tobacco harm reduction.
“Once the government regulated and legalized vaping, they said if you can’t stop smoking any other way, switch to vaping,” Glover says in the Filter video above. “They did a mass media campaign and they have a vaping facts website that addresses myths and misinformation. The government is actually encouraging people to switch.”
New Zealand’s success contrasts sharply with nearby Australia, where the government has adopted far more restrictive policies—banning sales of all nonprescription vaping devices, e-liquids, cartridges and related products (very limited pharmacy sales are now being permitted). Australia’s smoking rate has since declined more slowly than New Zealand’s; smoking kills more than 20,000 Australians per year.
Progress was “so slow” for much of her 30 years in the field. But in the past decade, Māori smoking prevalence has plunged.
Glover, who is Māori, is the founder and director of the Centre of Research Excellence: Indigenous Sovereignty & Smoking (COREISS). She has traveled around the world to work with Indigenous peoples on reducing smoking harms. Some of her work has focused on pregnant Māori women, who have historically had high smoking rates.
In recent years, Māori people have not only switched to vaping on a large scale but are also manufacturing e-liquids and opening vape shops.
“I’ve never seen anything work like this,” Glover says. Progress was “so slow” for much of her 30 years in the field. But in the past decade, Māori daily smoking prevalence has plunged from 38 percent to 17 percent, thanks to vapes.
Glover also discusses how New Zealand’s very heavy tobacco taxes have made cigarettes and loose tobacco unaffordable for many. She doesn’t see that as a positive, when it has pushed some people to collect cigarette butts or beg for cigarettes. It’s the kind of indignity she doesn’t want to see policy inflict, and she opposes the way high tobacco taxes impoverish the most vulnerable groups of people who smoke.
Importantly, though, the New Zealand government uses risk-proportionate taxation and doesn’t tax vaping products.
Glover believes that nicotine policy “needs to have as a focus those that are most marginalized, lower-income, low access to health care and low education. Focus on them; will a policy work for them? If it works for them, it will work for everyone else.”
Both COREISS and The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, have received grants from Global Action to End Smoking. Filter‘s Editorial Independence Policy applies.
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