Dr Lucy Hardie is concerned that New Zealand has the wrong approach to regulation of vaping products. Photo: Claire Concannon / RNZ
When Dr Lucy Hardie opens a brown cardboard box, the smell that wafts out is reminiscent of bubblegum and cola lollies. The brightly coloured vapes inside look like kids' toys.
These vapes are disposable, now banned, and many of the flavours are now off the shelves too. But this collection tells the story of how New Zealand got to where we are now - with youth vaping rates among the highest in the world.
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Loose regulatory beginnings
When vaping products first showed up in New Zealand, regulators assumed they were covered by existing legislation - a section of the Smoke-free Environments Amendment Act 2003.
But in March 2018, the Ministry of Health took a case against Philip Morris International for selling 'Heets' - a heated tobacco product - and lost.
This meant that existing tobacco regulations did not cover vaping products.
Photo: Richard R. Schünemann / Unsplash
"We just suddenly saw a sort of instant boom in the amount of retailers," says Lucy. "Every sort of small town in New Zealand suddenly has this shiny new retail outlet. You can buy them online, you can buy them at the counter of your local convenience store right next to the lollipops on the counter. There was just nothing in place to protect people."
The first attempt at legislation came in 2020, which, among other things, banned sales to minors and use indoors. But youth vaping rates continued to rise.
This prompted further legislation amendments in 2021, 2023 and 2025 with new rules to try and slow the uptake by young people. These included restrictions on flavouring and flavour names, laws that meant new vape shops couldn't open next to schools and community hubs, and a ban of the use of cartoons on packaging.
The most recent regulations, which came into effect in June of this year, include a ban on disposable vapes; a restriction of vaping product visibility in stores and online; a ban on promotions, discounts and giveaways; and restrictions around advertising.
Sign which reads No Smoking, No Vaping. Photo: Mike Mozart / CC-BY 2.0
Not just replacing smoking
For Lucy, we got the approach to regulation wrong.
"In New Zealand, there was so much hope that it was going to be a silver bullet for smoking that we just weren't strong enough. And when you put in something that's too weak to start with, you kind of struggle to claw anything back," she says.
From what we know to date, vaping is less harmful than smoking. But with research indicating that tobacco kills two in every three smokers, the bar, Lucy says, is really low.
And she's concerned about the cohort of young people that have newly taken to vaping, as supposed to swapping from smoking.
"Not only is it highly addictive, which causes a range of stresses … but we also just, we don't know what the long-term damage is," she says.
Dr Kelly Burrowes studies the impact of vaping on the lungs. Photo: Chris Loufte
Not just flavoured air
At the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, associate professor Kelly Burrowes and her team have been trying to investigate the impact of vaping on people's lungs.
One of the first things they did was investigate the different chemicals found in New Zealand-made vaping liquids, and in the vape aerosols produced when they are heated.
The basic liquid is made of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine, into which the different flavouring compounds and nicotine are dissolved.
When the researchers analysed the aerosols they found heavy metals - which can cause organ dysfunction when they accumulate in our bodies - and small amounts of other known toxins - for example, formaldehyde, a known cancer-causing agent.
These toxins appeared in lower concentrations than they would be in cigarette smoke. But Kelly is concerned that just one chemical that damages the lungs is enough to cause disease.
Device used to test how cells respond to vape exposure. Photo: Supplied
This was the case with the EVALI (e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury) outbreak in the US that occurred just before the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe. By the end of the outbreak, there had been well over 2,000 cases and 68 deaths. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) eventually linked it to vitamin E acetate in cannabis or THC vapes, though a fifth of the cases did involve nicotine vapes.
It's now banned from vaping liquids, but the concern remains that other chemicals in the aerosols might also be damaging lung cells - just at a slower pace than what happened in the EVALI outbreak.
Marzieh Aghababaie, PhD candidate at Auckland Bioengineering Institute. Photo: Claire Concannon / RNZ
Will vaping lead to long-term lung diseases?
One of the PhD candidates in Kelly's lab, Marzieh Aghababaie, has been investigating the impact of vape aerosols on lung cells in a dish. After half an hour 'vaping' in her experimental set up, the cells showed increased signs of damage, stress, and inflammation.
Other researchers have similarly reported increases in inflammatory and stress markers in response to vape aerosols. The tricky part is figuring out whether this means that vaping over decades will lead to similar diseases seen in smokers.
"There haven't yet been people with lung cancer or COPD or emphysema from vaping. And that's not to say that it won't happen because those sorts of diseases happen in people sort of over 50 years old … I would say there's probably no one who's vaped yet from a teenager to 50. They just haven't been around long enough. So I just don't think we can answer that," Kelly says.
Her next study will aim to help address this.
She's recruiting vaping participants, taking CT scans of their lungs, and using these images - along with sputum (essentially spit from the lung) - to see whether they can detect early changes like those seen in smokers who get lung diseases.
But physical health problems are not the only concern when it comes to youth vaping - there's also the issue of addiction.
While the prevalence of daily smoking has declined among young people over the last decade or so, the prevalence of daily vaping has increased, according to data from the Ministry of Health. Photo: Ministry of Health
Other types of harm
"For some young people, they realise that they can't stop when they want to and that then creates other feelings about shame or embarrassment," says Lani Teddy.
Lani works in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago and is part of the ASPIRE Aotearoa group which does research aimed at helping achieve a tobacco-free future.
She has worked on research with a qualitative focus: talking to young people about their lived experiences of vaping, and how it has affected their lives. She's also heard from teachers and principals about the disruption students' nicotine addiction is causing in schools.
In a new project, Te Hau Hou, she and her colleagues hope to hear from rangatahi Māori about their experiences, and what their thoughts are on how policy should address the issue.
For Lucy, we already have a starting playbook, and we should use it. "We've done this already with tobacco in New Zealand really effectively … the argument is always that we shouldn't be unduly regulating a product which isn't as harmful as smoking. But the real question is, who is it less harmful for? And if you're not a smoker and you start vaping, then that is much more harmful than breathing air."
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