It took just 10 minutes for us to buy an illegal vape in Griffith

New vape laws have now been introduced, meaning vapes can now only be sold in pharmacies to those with a prescription - and can't be brightly coloured or sugary flavoured, either.

Despite this, The Area News was able to purchase a disposable strawberry-flavoured vape in under 10 minutes of searching.

Now that pharmacies are the only legal providers of vape products, pharmacists have been put in the tough spot of balancing retail with healthcare advice.

Pharmacist Sean Dodd said that they were uncomfortable with selling vapes, particularly considering the lack of TGA approval or enough proven data on the effects of vaping.

"There's still an inherent risk. I understand what the government is trying to do... They've seen pharmacies as a healthcare provider-slash-retailer but pharmacy as an industry wants to drop that retail moniker,' he said.

"Essentially, the concern is we're just moving a problem from tobacconists and traditional sellers into pharmacy. We don't particularly see it as any better than smoking and we wouldn't sell cigarettes."

While pharmacists will be required to assess the need for it and only provide vapes where it's deemed to be used to help quit smoking or reduce nicotine dependence, Mr Dodd said that it would remain incredibly difficult to tell.

"It comes back to the whole 'is it really a cessation device or is it just another form of smoking' question ... With all these things, smoking included - people do it recreationally and they do have addictions so the issue becomes filtering those out," he said.

"If you are filtering correctly, the need for the black market vapes still exists so it's not a silver bullet for black market vapes to make them available."

Mr Dodd said that though there would be some pharmacies that would leap at the chance, considering the amount of money that could be made, he wasn't interested in pursuing it and was encouraged that many other pharmacies agreed.

"I am not going to dispute that there'd be good money to be made in doing it but at the risk of your own reputation and what you're trying to do - the industry is really pushing to go down a professional service model and I'd prefer we focus on things like that rather than selling our soul," he said.

"I, for one, don't want to be a part of it."