Vaping culture is continuing to grow as more and more Kiwis take up vaping.
From bars to bus stops, you'll see people puffing away on these electronic cigarette replacements, leaving behind clouds of often sweetly-scented smoke.
Many of these devices are also giving people a hit of the highly addictive nicotine. But across the ditch in Australia, nicotine vapes are prescription only and it's something people are calling to happen in Aotearoa as well.
Dr Bryan Betty, who's currently the Medical Director of The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners told Lloyd Burr he isn't sure a prescription is the best way forward for New Zealand.
"What we've said to the Select Committee when we went there was … [we're] starting to think about things like should it be available in pharmacies only without a script?" Betty said.
"Should we be pulling back a little bit on the pre-availability of vaping that we're seeing and should we get a bit of a balance here in terms of what's happening because of potential long-term consequences of this that we may not be fully aware of at this point?
"We have to start to think pretty hard about this from a legislative point of view."
Betty said while he is fully supportive of vaping as a smoking cessation tool, he is very concerned about the adolescent vaping rates. While the long-term effects of vaping aren't fully known as of yet, it can be highly addictive.
Betty told Burr some research from the last year has shown that vaping can increase "susceptibility to blood clots" and can "worsen things like asthma".
"If we go back to 2019, 25 percent of the adolescent students who were vaping used nicotine, we now know that 80 percent of vapes have nicotine in them, so there's an increase in the [adolescent] nicotine rates," he said.
"We know there's an increase in the number of younger adolescents who are taking up vaping and significantly about 30 percent of those daily vapers in adolescents wouldn't have otherwise smoked.
"That's a real, real concern."
Listen to the full interview between Dr Bryan Betty and Lloyd Burr above.
You can also download the full interview on the Lloyd Burr Live podcast, and listen on the go.
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