Thousands of vaping products will have to be taken off the shelves from Friday as new regulation comes into effect.
The move is part of the amended Smokefree Vaping Act rolled out 15 months ago, which includes it only being legal to sell vape products registered with the Ministry of Health.
Action for Smokefree 2025 director Deborah Hart on Friday told Breakfast the new regulations mean manufacturers need to be more transparent about what's in their products.
"The Government has been rolling out regulations right from the very start of the (Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products) Act. So from the start of the Act until today, one of the things we've been doing is around the safety of the product," she said.
"Six months ago importers and manufacturers had to start notifying what was in their products - had to notify labels, packaging and what's in the products.
"And today they had to do all that, they can only sell what's been notified, and to notify they had to adhere to the safety regime that had been set up by the Government. So that's fantastic."
Hart said she expected in six months time there will be even more safety measures in place because regulators will be looking at the changes closely and determining even more what can we sold and what can't.
However, Hart said most people use vaping to quit smoking, which is "fantastic" as it is a lot less harmful than the latter.
The New Zealand Health Survey for 2020/2021 revealed about 88,000 adults quit smoking in a year.
"What we're seeing is as the vaping rates go up, smoking goes down. It's almost a mirror image when you graph it," Hart said.
But should parents be worried as more children and teens look to experiment with vaping?
"We certainly don't want kids taking up vaping. The reason you take up vaping is to quit smoking and unfortunately we let the genie out of the bottle," Hart said.
"It took us a long time to regulate vaping, we only got legislation in November 2020. Ash New Zealand has been asking for vaping legislation for a decade."
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