Shocked
The BBC quoted Prof Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard, who is Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, as saying she was “genuinely shocked” by their findings. “Unregulated products need to be taken off our streets, out of our shops, and our young people need to be protected.
“Vaping is something we should be avoiding if we can, albeit better than smoking. If you have any suspicion that your child is using an illicit vape, this is dangerous for their health. Please intervene,” she advised parents and carers.
The government says it has allocated £3m to tackle the sale of illegal vapes in England, and wants to fund more test purchases and have the products removed from shops. In Australia, the government has called for vapes to be banned except as anti-smoking aids available on prescription, and plans to eliminate attractive packaging and flavours. But a thriving black market in vapes threatens to undermine its plans.
Argyll and Bute Council is calling on the Scottish Government to place a ban on single use disposable vapes.
At least 1.3 million disposable vapes end up in landfill each week in the UK, posing a significant danger to the environment, as well as a health risk to those who use them.
The council’s Policy Lead for Climate Change and Environment Services, Councillor Ross Moreland, said: “According to Action on Smoking and Health, vaping among the 11-17 year old age group doubled over the last year, likely due to the growth in cheap, disposable single use vapes. Not only does this pose serious health issues in the future, the environmental impact is massive.
“The large majority of these vapes are not being recycled as they should be and are instead being disposed of in household waste.
A single disposable vape can take up to 1,000 years to degrade. This means, for just a week’s worth of thrown-away vapes it will take 1.3 billion years for them to decompose. On top of that, disposable vapes can leak toxic chemicals, such a lithium. The environmental impact of single-use vapes is really worrying and this is something that needs to be urgently addressed.”
Evidence
The government has been monitoring the evidence base for several years and has commissioned a series of independent evidence reviews setting out the evidence on vaping. The latest report in this series Nicotine vaping in England: an evidence update including health risks and perceptions was published in September 2022. This report is the most comprehensive to date. It found that in the short and medium term, vaping poses a small fraction of the risks of smoking, but that vaping is not risk free, particularly for people who have never smoked. It also noted that interventions that provide advice on the harms of vapes need to be carefully designed so they do not misinform young people (particularly smokers) about the relative harms of smoking and vaping.
See also: Should We Follow Australia’s Vaping Ban?
