2 weeks Ago By The Telegraph
Has anyone in government ever asked a teenager what they’d do if vapes were made illegal? Clearly not, it seems, if you’ve read the work of Caitlin Notley, professor of addiction studies at the University of East Anglia. “It’s crucial that we talk to young people about their views on vaping, because they’re the ones who can inform us about the unintended consequences of a ban,” Prof Notley says. “The possibility that after an outright ban on disposable vapes is real, and it’s a big concern for us.
” After interviewing about their experiences with vaping and smoking for a study published in the summer, Prof Notley and her team concluded that a hard ban on disposable vapes will likely put dangerous, black market devices in the hands of more children, and lead some to smoke cigarettes instead. Cheap disposable vapes have already taken over schools, with many teachers confiscating Elf Bars in classrooms and school staff “installing cameras and vape detectors in toilets”. A ban cannot undo the fact that e to a generation of young people, and many teenagers now have a reliance on nicotine that could be tough to break without proper support, Prof Notley says.
“A ban will be a big experiment,” she adds, and “we don’t know what exactly will happen until it’s tried, but every ban on something dangerous comes with unintended consequences.” Here is why a hard ban on disposable vapes could do more harm than good – and might not produce a smoke-free generation after all. The disposable vape ban that’s set to come in from June is meant to protect young people from the allure of fun, colourful and cheap devices, with fruity flavours that are “meant to appeal to children,” Prof Notley says.
The logic behind this is that clunky and costly rechargeable vapes, used by many adults to quit smoking, will not appeal to children or be as easily accessible to them. But given the months it has taken for the legislation behind the ban to come through, “many companies will have seen this coming”, Prof Notley explains. Multiple companies are now “producing rechargeable or refillable vapes that are cheap and easily available, and that look much like the devices that young people are using today, but these won’t be banned because they aren’t covered by the specific legislation”.
Some of the young people who have been involved in the research by Prof Notley and her team “are already using these devices, and products will evolve alongside the ban, so we don’t necessarily know what will become available on the market”. will also treat rechargeable devices “like disposable ones” because of their appearance. As Prof Notley points out, “it’s already illegal to sell vapes to people under 18,” and yet children and teenagers still manage to get hold of them.
In 2023, had tried vaping, and more than one in 10 were vaping at least once or twice a week. Young people are often procuring disposable vapes from unscrupulous corner shops or from older friends, who buy vapes in bulk to sell them on, Prof Notley explains. Then there is the pre-existing “black market for vapes that come in from abroad, that are cheap and quite easily available, but that aren’t regulated in the same way,” Prof Notley says.
“If you ban something, there’s the potential that people might use illegal products that are more harmful, whereas when something is legal you can regulate and more tightly control it.” On top of this “we know that some children are using these illegal products already, and some of my work has involved primary age children, to create guidelines on how to spot one of these more dangerous devices”. While fashion and social group patterns are important reasons why young people have started vaping – as well as the comforting “behavioural aspect of vaping that involves the regular hand to mouth movement,” Prof Notley says – these alone don’t explain why people continue vaping after trying it out.
Like adults, teenagers develop dependencies on nicotine, sometimes within weeks or only days of when their occasional vape or cigarette use starts. “Young people who are vaping regularly probably do have a , and we need to find ways to support them and help them not to turn to smoking tobacco,” says Prof Notley. Like illegal vapes, “illicit tobacco products are a huge problem, and young people are often quite streetwise and know how to get hold of cigarettes”.
It might sound incredible to anyone who grew up watching adverts about the dangers of smoking, but the anti-cigarette messaging that today’s teenagers have received is typically much weaker than older people might remember themselves. “It probably is the perception that as smoking levels decline in the population, we think that young people taking up smoking is no longer something we need to stop, so there has been de-investment in those media campaigns that are intended to deter people from smoking,” says Prof Notley. “Teenagers might not have seen those adverts but they will have heard horror stories about .
” All this makes it more likely that children who depend on nicotine will start smoking cigarettes. Of course, vapes aren’t risk-free – “no one would want to tell teenagers that vaping is safe,” says Prof Notley – but because of the information they’re getting online and sometimes in school, “young people can be confused about the relative harm of smoking cigarettes compared to vaping”. While no one would want their child to vape, it would be wrong to assume that vaping is a more dangerous pastime than smoking.
Nicotine is addictive, but not carcinogenic on its own. With cigarettes meanwhile, “we know that with tobacco, the harm comes from inhaling combusted tobacco smoke, and that it’s the chemical changes involved in this that really cause the harms.” “The average tobacco cigarette, when inhaled, contains over 7,000 different chemicals and at least 70 , which are known to directly cause cancer, through many years of research,” Prof Notley says.
Again, as disposable vapes are still so new, there has not been enough time for long-term studies that consider the impacts of regular vape use over multiple decades – so it’s safest to use neither. Inhaling nicotine from a vape can also raise your blood pressure and damage the tissue in your lungs. But disposable vapes cut out the combustion involved in smoking, “and while the jury is still out on how safe the flavouring chemicals in different vapes are,” and illegal vapes might have more worrying chemicals added into them, “vaping should be much less harmful”.
Before disposable vapes came along, smoking cigarettes was the main mode of nicotine consumption in Britain. Today around , and around 9 per cent of adults vape, with around half of vapers being ex-smokers. In 2016, 19 per cent of adults in Britain smoked, while around 6 per cent of people vaped.
, meanwhile, snus – tobacco pouches that people put between their gums and lips – is the most common form of nicotine consumption. As a result “Sweden has incredibly low levels of tobacco smoking, because the cultural norm there has changed”. Just 6 per cent of the Swedish population smokes cigarettes daily, with young people being the least likely to smoke.
While snus comes with its own health problems – regular use has been linked to increased risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease – it has also been proven safer than cigarettes to consume regularly. Normalising smoking again then, by making disposable vapes illegal, could cause more people to suffer the ill health effects that come with regular cigarette smoking. The Government’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill could outlaw the sale of cigarettes and vapes to anyone who hasn’t turned 15 by the end of this year.
But today’s 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to buy rechargeable vapes or cigarettes as soon as they turn 18, and already young women over 18 years old in particular “are smoking tobacco in larger numbers” than had previously been seen, Prof Notley says. It is advised that adults who smoke switch to vaping, “and many of those flavours in disposable vapes that are appealing to children are also appealing to adults who want to stop smoking,” she explains. While it’s important to design vapes in such a way that they aren’t appealing to children, a ban – with all its potential side-effects – might not be necessary to prevent this.
“Just calling something blueberry flavour rather than “iced blueberry” might be enough to be fine for adults, while less appealing to children,” Prof Notley adds..
