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Auckland Council will investigate a vaping ban in council-owned open spaces.
At the Regulatory and Community Safety Committee on September 5, members discussed the issue of vaping being an effective tool to help people quit smoking.
Currently, vaping and smoking are banned in council-owned indoor facilities, but councillors want this to be extended to outdoor areas as well.
The decision came after Action for Smokefree 2025 representative Ben Youdan explained the tricky issue of supporting smoking cessation while trying to avoid rangatahi/young people taking up a vaping habit.
He said that 10 years ago, wāhine Māori had the highest smoking rate in the OECD and some of the highest lung cancer mortality in the world.
“In the last two years, the daily smoking rate for wāhine Māori has dropped by one-third,” Youdan said.
He said that in 25 years of working in this field, he had never seen anything like it, and it was almost entirely a result of wāhine Māori switching to vapes.
“It is having huge disruption on probably one of the single leading preventable causes of health inequity but at the same time [we are] trying to ensure that it’s not getting into the hands of young people.”
He said new regulation around vaping needed better enforcement.
“We need reinforcement of the fact that these are products for adults,” he urged.
“They should be R21 unless somebody is a smoker but many of the vape shops have windows built full of paraphernalia that’s got nothing to do with vaping.”
Social Wellbeing senior policy manager Ben Brooks said council’s position was to support vaping as a quit tool but that it should not be used by non-smokers or rangatahi.
“By ethnicity, young Māori have the highest vaping rates. That is where we probably have most reason for concern,” Brooks said.
Independent Māori Statutory Board member Edward Ashby asked if Māori were being targeted.
“In terms of low hanging fruit, given the higher rates of Māori vaping, are we seeing a pattern of Māori rangatahi being targeted?” Ashby asked.
“Anecdotally, there are concerns from the community that there is proliferation around schools and marae,” Brooks said.
