Cigarette smokers are set to be hit with a £1.15 a pack price hike and 30g of tobacco to rise by £2.00 a pouch on the next budget March 15th 2023.
The price hike is likely to be in line with inflation possibly adding to an increasing black market.
With the cost of living crisis still rising what cost is smoking going to have on your finances?
In the meantime Professor Sir Chris Whitty attacks ‘appalling’ marketing of vapes to children, saying it is clear some products are intended to appeal to underage kids.
He said: “Disposables vapes – things like Elf Bar – are clearly the kinds of products which look as if they’re being marketed, in reality, at children.
Has anybody told him child tobacco smoking is down by 3% (I’m in no way promoting vaping for minors) but it is the number one smoking cessation tool?
Other vape manufacturers do flavours such as Skittles, Gummy Bear, Tiger Blood and Jungle Juice which I wasn’t going to stock for the reasons you quote, with all due respect (Of which I have little for you after your outrageous claims about covid) it was down to demand from adults that I added these products to stock.
Also who gets to decide which flavours adults can vape, personally I enjoy a variety of flavours, as do my adult customers?
I quit smoking just over a year ago using Elf Bars and continue to do so. my favourite flavours are Mad Blue, Elfbull Ice and Cherry Cola, perhaps concentrate more on child smoking which is what caused me to have COPD aged 40. Personally I find tobacco flavour disgusting and reminds me of smoking but I guess it’s all about personal choice.
Perhaps Mr Whitty can specifically name the flavours aimed at children and using his logic shouldn’t he be calling for all alcohol to taste the same?
This also raises the question, does it apply to just disposable vapes / e-cigarettes or does it apply to the 1000’s of different e-juices available?
Has there ever been a better time to quit smoking?
Quite frankly I’m fed up of seeing negative comments from people on news channels saying how dangerous vaping is, yet they’ve tried it themselves and obviously never looked at the available data.
I don’t know how many times I can reiterate if you don’t smoke, don’t start vaping but if you do smoke vaping is a 95% safer nicotine form.
I will be guided by the advice of;
- Public Health England – Public Health England (PHE) must stop promoting vaping as an alternative option to cigarettes, suggesting that is 95% safer than smoking, and instead respond to the actual health emergency in young people.
- The Royal College of Physicians – vaping isn’t completely risk-free but is far less harmful than smoking tobacco. If you’ve switched to vaping and are finding it helpful to stop you smoking, and are not suffering any adverse effects, then carry on, don’t go back to smoking.
- NHS Smoke-Free – There’s evidence that they can be effective. A 2021 review found people who used e-cigarettes to quit smoking, as well as having expert face-to-face support, can be up to twice as likely to succeed as people who used other nicotine replacement products, such as patches or gum.
- The British Lung Foundation – We don’t recommend anyone using e-cigarettes unless they are trying to stop smoking. So, while it’s clear vaping is less harmful for health than smoking, it’s best to stop vaping eventually.
- The British Heart Foundation – Dr Mike Knapton, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Stopping smoking is the single best thing you can do for your heart health. Smoking directly causes heart disease, respiratory disease, as well as many cancers and despite 70 per cent of smokers wanting to quit, there are still nearly nine million adults in the UK that smoke. “There are 2.6 million e-cigarette users in the UK, and many smokers are using them to help quit. Although more research is needed to establish the long term safety of e-cigarettes, they are likely to cause significantly less harm to your health than smoking tobacco.”
Earlier this year BHF funded research found that e-cigarettes have overtaken licensed nicotine replacement therapies such as NRT, gum or skin patches as the most popular form of support to stop smoking, and they continue to increase in popularity.
- Cancer research UK – It’s been a decade since e-cigarettes first gained popularity in the UK. Since then, the types of devices available and the number of people using them has risen sharply.
Around 12,000 of us “Google” this each month in the UK. And you can understand why – there are a lot of mixed messages out there when it comes to e-cigarettes, with many headlines proclaiming that vaping is just as bad as or worse than smoking.
In fact, research shows that vaping is far less harmful than smoking.
And as the popularity levels of e-cigarettes grew, so did the debate around them.
The big selling point for e-cigarettes is they’re a way to help people stop smoking and reduce harm from the biggest cause of cancer in the world, tobacco.
But it’s a balancing act. E-cigarettes contain nicotine and so it’s important to make sure that people who have never smoked, particularly young people, don’t start to use them.
Vaping has been around for over 10 years in the UK now and not one single death compared to 780,000 deaths from tobacco smoking in the same period.
All of this beggars the question what are the motives to attack vaping when smoking costs the NHS £17 billion every year?
Josef Stalin (in)famously said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.” This could easily be related to smoking related illnesses and deaths.
The UK Vaping Industry Authority has called for harsher penalties for shops and outlets selling vaping products to minors.
Every person who dies from a smoking related illness is a customer lost to big tobacco companies, do you really think tobacco companies care about your health?
Great read !!!