There’s nothing unfair about stopping people killing themselves – vapes are horrific creations
Some things you just know. You know them intrinsically, implicitly and irrefutably – even if you’re still waiting for proof.
Take vaping. Any day now, the scientists are going to tell us that sticking a metal tube – charged from your laptop – into your mouth and inhaling some sinister e-potion made up of nicotine, propylene glycol (used to make antifreeze and paint solvent), acetaldehyde and formaldehyde (embalming fluid) is A Very Bad Idea.
It’s actually far more dangerous than smoking, they’ll tell a populace stupefied to hear that ingesting antifreeze and embalming fluid will, in fact, maim and kill you in a series of highly imaginative ways. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is what these weird little devices designed and flavoured to corrupt a generation of under-age kids have done to those children.
Rishi Sunak has predicted all this. It’s why he’s announced a UK ban on disposable vapes for children of 15 or younger. Like me, he will have taken in what’s already known about the 21-year-old practice first touted as a smoking alternative with mounting horror.
He will have read about the “pulmonary oedema” and “lung injury” already affecting young vapers across the globe, heard the World Health Organisation’s warning that vaping would, among other things, have “long-term consequences for brain development and potentially lead to learning and anxiety disorders”, and understood that these consequences could be permanent.
According to Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist and PSHE lecturer who gave a seminar on vaping at my daughter’s school last year, the very “size, structure and function of the brain” is affected by what it is exposed to during those crucial formative years. “Although children are legally an adult at 18,” Dr Sigman points out, “their brains won’t be adult for another seven years or more.”
Then there are the statistics. Sunak will have learnt that 9 per cent of British children aged 11 to 15 now vape, that there has been a 50 per cent growth in experimentation (trying once or twice), from 7.7 per cent in 2022 to 11.6 per cent in 2023, and that despite the legal age being 18, 48 per cent of young people are still buying their vapes from shops – fruit-flavoured (60 per cent), generally, if not sweet or soft drink-flavoured (25 per cent).
As a father of two young girls, he’ll be as sickened by these figures as every parent. As a prime minister who may be in his last few months of power, he clearly wants to use that time to ban the most popular vapes with children (disposable ones), bring in new £100 fines for shops selling illegally to children and give trading standards officers “on the spot” powers to tackle under-age tobacco and vape sales.
He wants to get this one incontrovertibly good thing done.
Only the ban has proved controversial, because as part of Sunak’s “smoke-free generation” plan it will also mean that any child of 15 or under will never legally be able to buy cigarettes of any kind. Cue cries of “nanny state socialism”, “managerialism at its worst”, “absolute lunacy”, and possibly my favourite: “That means that some people who were in the same year at school will not be able to smoke!” Because in a world where babies are blown up this is the apotheosis of injustice?
To the “nanny state” brigade I would say: children tend to grow up to become adults. When laws change, as they do, there will always be those who experienced a blissful former life where they were allowed to suck on cherry cola-flavoured embalming fluid, and those who, through circumstance alone, were denied that pleasure. Isn’t the basis of “phasing out” that there’s a whimsical cut-off point somewhere along the line? And if anything is to be phased out, surely profoundly toxic cancer-causing chemicals stunting children’s brains is quite high on the list?
Nevertheless, rebel Tory MPs will mock, with one quoted as saying: “I’m sure banning vapes goes down brilliantly among the Californian fasting community, but our voters want the boats stopping and their wage packets growing.”
Probably just as well he or she chose to remain anonymous. I doubt history would judge them well, and it’ll be hard to trivialise the poisoning of a generation of children once the truth about vaping comes out. Anyone with an ounce of common sense already knows that.
