In a knee-jerk reaction top UK supermarkets have pulled flavoured vapes from their shelves.
There are a few bones to pick from this and I’ll try and address them.
Firstly ***Spoiler Alert*** Tobacco is actually a flavour and doesn’t contain tobacco.
The very same supermarkets are happy to keep selling deadly tobacco products including cigarettes, rolling tobacco and cigars etc.
Also is this some kind of admission that they are selling product to minors while denying ex-smokers access to the smoking cessation products they need?
Imagine banning a 95% safer nicotine device while selling a product that is responsible for 78,000 deaths every year in the UK which costs society £17bn a year.
I do however understand the environmental issues surrounding single use disposable vapes and have outlined in previous blogs how this issue could be addressed.
People are too quick to look at problems and call for prohibitions rather than look for solutions.
Data shows adult vapers who quit the deadly tobacco overwhelmingly enjoy fruit flavoured devices.
Whatever flavour helps you quit smoking is relevant, before vaping arrived on the scene, underage people would buy cigarettes. As someone who smoked cigarettes for 40 years and diagnosed with COPD for 10 years I can speak with confidence and experience.
Quitting smoking can be one of the hardest things to do because nicotine is a highly addictive substance but doesn’t cause any smoking related diseases; it’s the other production of toxins in cigarettes which cause cancers, COPD and other smoking related illnesses.
While I acknowledge an increase in underage vaping, it’s also worth noting that there has been a steady decline in underage people taking up tobacco products.
These problems will always exist as children are inquisitive by nature and it doesn’t help that shops in the small town I live in are happy to sell vapes to children my sons’ age – 13!
The same shops also sell alcohol to underage people; children are not stupid they know the place to go to get what they want.
Nobody is advocating for children vaping but if they are going to try anything I would rather this than tobacco based products.
Cigarettes have damaged my lungs permanently and after switching to vaping for a year my symptoms have improved, this is backed up by The British Lung Foundation although due to this I will need steroid inhalers for the rest of my life.
Nobody but me is to blame but why the sudden outrage over a 95% safer nicotine device?
Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
A study published in the Lancet said efforts to curb the habit had been outstripped by population growth with 150 million more people smoking in the nine years from 1990, reaching an all-time high of 1.1 billion.
Some facts:
- 100 million people died of tobacco-related causes during the 20th century.
- Tobacco currently kills 5.4 million people per year.
- Tobacco use makes six of the world’s eight leading causes of death — including heart disease, stroke, and cancer — more likely.
Of the more than 1 billion smokers alive today, around 500 million will be killed by tobacco.
The WHO predicts that, without intervention, tobacco will kill more than 8 million people every year by 2030, and 80% of those deaths will occur in developing countries.
If you are campaigning against vaping i can only presume you are pro-tobacco
Now let’s compare that with deaths from vaping nicotine:
How many deaths have been linked to vaping UK?
Between May 2016 and January 2021 the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK received 231 reports of 618 adverse reactions believed to be associated with vaping product. Since May 2016 there have been three deaths in the UK linked with vaping products but it is not clear what other products were contained in the e-juice.
Anyone with the slightest common sense can see that tobacco is the real problem and global epidemic but smoking lobbying groups yield a lot of power.
No doubt you will have seen some of the stories in the media recently following the publication of PHE’s latest update of the evidence on e-cigarettes. E-cigarettes do seem to be a bit like Marmite, courting controversy among the public and media alike.
Not surprisingly, there are lots of inaccuracies and misconceptions about e-cigarettes and vaping. This blog looks at some of the most common myths and provides the facts from the UK government.
Hospitals in the UK are now no-smoking areas but vaping is accepted. In fact my last hospital stay, I enjoyed having a vape along with a nurse who told me they’d saved her life.
The message has always been clear, if you don’t smoke, don’t start vaping and if you do smoke vaping can provide 95% safer nicotine resulting in tobacco harm reduction.
When I was at school there were posters everywhere warning children the dangers of smoking and drugs but did this stop children smoking? Perhaps some but not the circles I moved in. Most of these people still smoke and I want to offer a safer alternative with a greater success rate of quitting than conventional methods. If nicotine is the main concern, it has been used for smoking cessation for years in the form of patches, lozenges and gum etc.
Four out of 10 smokers and ex-smokers wrongly think nicotine causes most of the tobacco smoking-related cancer, when evidence shows nicotine actually carries minimal risk of harm to health. Although nicotine is the reason people become addicted to smoking, it is the thousands of other chemicals contained in cigarette smoke that causes almost all of the harm.
E-cigarette vapour does not contain tar or carbon monoxide, two of the most harmful elements in tobacco smoke. It does contain some chemicals also found in tobacco smoke, but at much lower levels.
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