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Ministers set to ban single-use vapes in UK over child addiction fears
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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I definitely agree with you about not making it attractive to kids. But vaping has increased by less than smoking has decreased. Kids who would otherwise experiment with cigarettes use vapes instead. Kids who got hooked on smoking use vapes to quit.
It's not an easy balance to strike. I'm not saying we should encourage kids to vape! But it's important not to lose sight of the prize. It's a much better option than smoking, and less addictive too.
For the avoidance of doubt, of course disposables should be banned. On environmental grounds alone but also because they're designed and marketed as impulse purchases for kids.
As a teacher, my concern is that our school went from a small group of about 10 smokers, to now just about every kid has a fancy colourful and flavourful disposable vape. It is crazy the sheer number of them. And the number of smokers has dropped significantly in the last 10 years as well.
I don't know if replacing the small number of smokers in the school for a huge number of vaping children is better, if I'm honest. The amount of them that are addicted to nicotine and energy drinks now is really quite scary.
I'm not so sure about this. I don't have any sources but anecdotally it seems like a lot of kids have leaped into vaping without having ever smoked and have got nicotine habits. It began whenever Juul started marketing themselves as wanting to be the 'ipod of vaping' long ago and specifically targeted young people in the advertising despite what they might have said
Before then it wasn't a thing - it was adults who had found a way to stop smoking and were being left to do it in peace. I'll be proper annoyed if all this leads to me not being able to vape anymore because nothing else worked stopping me smoking. It's the lesser of two evils by a very long shot.
Imo you should have responsible licensed vape shops that sell these things, and I'd be fine with plain packaging - most of the stuff I get is pretty much in plain packaging already from vpz.
But if they ban disposables there's going to be an opening for a black market for dodgy stuff full of even more rubbish. Frankly, they should have done something about this a long time ago