Forty a day for forty years – that’s a hell of a lot of cigarettes – but je ne regret rien. I loved smoking. But note the past tense because, eventually, for all the clichéd health reasons you can imagine, I had to give up. Despite always knowing it was a matter of life or death, I dreaded packing it in. Smoking has been so much part of my persona for decades; I just couldn’t imagine life without puffing away. All the usual smoking cessation options didn’t work, from gum to patches, Alan Carr to NHS counselling. Until eventually, on the recommendation of no less than two NHS doctors, I tried disposable vapes. Miracle upon miracle, they worked. And I am now a happy chain vaper.
At last, I thought, I would stop being demonised for my bad habit. I have endured years of sanctimonious lectures from public health policy-wonks about how the dangers of tobacco meant smokers could be treated as pariahs, which – by the way – made giving up even less attractive. Who wants to succumb to bullying nanny state interference? Smoking was and is a personal choice, and in a free society we should be allowed to indulge in a legal bad habit, however risky or unhealthy. However now, newly virtuous as an ex-smoker, I imagined that at last I might get a pat on the back for being responsible.
How naïve. The modern state can’t help itself. It simply has to regulate and interfere in people’s personal choices. Never mind the public health benefits of vapes that have helped millions of people to stop smoking, DEFRA now finds them ‘extremely wasteful’. Disposable vapes are apparently a potential litter hazard and ‘blight our towns and cities’. Forget the real blight of derelict high streets, homelessness, boarded-up shops, widespread crime – the government’s focus is on disposable vapes.
Last October, when the government announced a forthcoming ban on 1 June, Mary Creagh, DEFRA’S Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature and ‘the circular economy minister’ (eh?), justified the prohibition as helping to ‘accelerate the path to net zero and create thousands of jobs across the country’. Which is a stretch when we are all waiting with bated breath for a growth strategy that will actually accelerate meaningful employment.
Meanwhile, when it becomes illegal to sell or supply disposable vapes, Trading Standards enforcement officers will have powers to seize non-compliant products, give out compliance notices and fines of £200, with serial offenders facing criminal charges, including unlimited fines or a prison sentence of up to two years. But as convicted criminals are being released early from prison, and enforcement of laws already in place to deal with black market cigarettes, are to say the least, patchy. This surely means scarce resources are being spread far too thinly. And for what?
The main aim of the ban seems to be to deal with environmental waste i.e. to reduce litter. An estimated five million disposable vapes were thrown away every week last year. So yes, I know many people do get very annoyed about unsightly discarded colourful plastic tubes on pavements. But for goodness sake, a whole range of less punitive solutions could have been explored; from special vape disposal bins to deposit schemes (each empty vape could mean £1 off next purchase or whatever) rather than deploying the whole paraphernalia of the state to deal with a minor waste issue, on a par with empty coke cans, crisp packets or – dare I say it – Waitrose sandwich wrappers. And if the Government are really worried about unseemly detritus on our streets, maybe it might tackle councils that have halved their bin collection service, creating domestic mounds of overflowing garbage, (please don’t blame Birmingham’s litter mountains on vapers).
What’s more, the whole scheme seems to be a waste of time because if policymakers had done any kind of cost / benefit analysis (or just used common sense) they’d know that vapers will buy the technically compliant new refillable, rechargeable vapes and won’t bother fiddling around with replacement pods and recharging. Who wants to have yet another device to remember to charge? They’ll be thrown away, effectively becoming disposable, and that’s because one of disposable vapes’ big attractions is they are easy to use and there’s no faff.
The truth is that the creator of disposable vapes should have been awarded a public health innovation award. Finally, a smoking cessation device that works for smokers. Instead, his invention is vilified, and we seek to ban it in order to tick some environmental box. At what cost? In one poll of UK vapers, almost a fifth said if they couldn’t get hold of disposable vapes, they’d go back to smoking.
So, it’s shocking that anti-smoking lobbyists like Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), not only support a legislative move that threatens to hinder smokers giving up the evil weed, but they say that the ban doesn’t go far enough. Indeed, ASH’s CEO Hazel Cheeseman urges the government to make use of powers within the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to clamp down further. The numpties in parliament are happy to oblige, promising an especially egregious ban on flavoured vapes.
In the House of Lords Second Reading debate, it was argued that these are especially wicked because they are designed to appeal to the young, as if only children like brightly coloured, sweet things. Have ministers not noticed the exponential rise in the flavoured gin market for adults? As I argued at the time, research shows that 65 per cent of adult vapers find fruit and sweet liquids preferable, often because they don’t want to be reminded of the taste of tobacco that they are quitting.
So, as we speak, like other vapers, I am stockpiling strawberry and banana disposables and predict the growth of a massive black market, or an uptick in smoking. And all because governments of all shades seem to be addicted to interfering with legal behaviours, carelessly indifferent to whether civil liberties – or indeed our health – go up in smoke.
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