29 January 2024 , 13:30
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Day 362 of Rishi Sunak Looking Tough And Doing Things, and he's announced a ban on disposable vapes to go alongside his ban on buying cigarette sales to create a "smokefree" generation.
But he's being so tough it'll all happen at some point after he's moved to California to spend more time with his money, his own party are just for a change rebelling against it, and he's completely failed to stop children becoming addicted to nicotine in the first place.
Nicotine, boys and girls, is a pesticide. It is not a vitamin, not a probiotic, not organic, and certainly not environmentally friendly. In fact Rishi would probably have a bit more success if he told Britain's teenagers that with every vape they were killing bees and collapsing the planet's ecosystem. But that wouldn't work either, because once you're addicted to nicotine you no longer give a damn about the reasons why you shouldn't be inhaling it.
That's why the tobacco companies invented vaping. And it's why they've been selling plastic capsules powered by batteries that were misleadingly-labelled "disposable" as though that turned petroleum byproducts and non-recyclable toxic minerals into the equivalent of a flimsy bit of cigarette paper. The government would like you to think the bad bits are all being banned, but they're not. Not by a long shot.
Jodie Hudson, 26, was hospitalised with vaping-related pneomoniaRishi Sunak Is Looking Tough And Doing Things today by visiting a school to promote the Tobacco and Vapes Bill which was announced in the King's Speech last year. It will make it illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone born after January 1, 2009. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that's already illegal, because such people are only 14, but this law won't come into effect until they're 18, in 2027.
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If anyone deserves a four-year warning it's Big Tobacco, which bless it has limited resources to cope. And the proposed law ignores the fact that almost a tenth of smokers are already addicted by the time they're 15. But over a generation, if the ban is brought in and stays, more children would be growing up in smoke-free homes which is no bad thing.
Except there's a sizeable rump of the Tory Party which believes inhaling benzenes, carbon monoxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide among other substances is the inalienable right of every freeborn Briton, and by God they should be allowed to exhale it all over their children and innocent bystanders too. Add in the fact this guy's got maybe six months left in Downing Street, and you can throw this "commitment to a smokefree generation" on the bonfire of Sunak's vanities.
(By the way kids, hydrogen cyanide was among the chemicals released when the cladding on Grenfell Tower went up in flames, and which killed many of that tragedy's victims. It also killed Zane Gbangbola in 2014 when his home was flooded, and filled with gas pushed up from a nearby rubbish dump.)
I don't remember seeing anyone rushing to breathe it in, do you? (PA)But the vaping. He's going to stop children vaping, right?
Nuh-UH-uh. The same legislation will bring in limits on packaging and flavours, which are at present used to make vapes more tempting to youngsters by making poison taste more like toilet cleaner. So the plan here is to ensure this "smokefree generation" smokes something that is packaged more like... the cigarettes smoked by grown-ups. I'm not sure they've thought that through.
He can't ban their sale to children, because it's already illegal to sell vapes to someone under 18 and carries fines of up to £2,500. Judging from the number of kids who vape on the bus, train or street, it is about as useful as, oh I don't know, a leaky vape battery. He could raise the fine to £50,000 a time, but no.
Around 15% of teens admit trying a vape. Half of them have never tried a cigarette, but are happy to puff on a candy-flavoured sick stick instead. Perhaps that's because while everyone knows smoking causes cancer and heart disease, very few people realise vaping causes collapsed lungs, pneumonia, and has even led to lung transplants. The government messaging on vaping has been so confused and predictably stupid that there are plenty of people who think it's not that bad for you.
They look a bit like lollipops, if lollipops were POISONOUS (Getty Images)Spoiler alert: inhaling toxic chemicals is ALWAYS bad for you. Because Big Tobacco's excuse for inventing it was to give smokers their nicotine fix while reducing all the other harmful smoke, the NHS declared it a good way to stop smoking.
Overnight, a million nicotine addicts took up vaping, and overnight they all started ingesting more nicotine. You can vape in more places than it is socially or even legally acceptable to smoke, and so these poor befuddled souls considered themselves better off for quitting smoking, and at the same time became MORE addicted to a pesticide. It may cost less overall than smoking, but with younger customers who can smoke in more places and ways, Big Tobacco still turns an unhealthy profit.
Nicotine can be deadly regardless of how it enters your body. If the word "pesticide" wasn't a clue, it increases blood pressure, narrows the artieries, lowers the sperm count, raises your risk of gut and lung disorders, and depresses your immune system. Yet because it also releases endorphins, the feel-good hormone in the human brain, you foolish naked apes think of it in the same way as a warm hug, even if you do have to go outside in the rain to get it.
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Tobacco causes all kinds of problems, but vaping causes a whole bunch of new ones. Vapes are even being used a currency in the criminal exploitation of children by drug gangs. And Rishi Sunak's two little angels are as at much risk of the harms delivered by any of it as they are of being hit by lightning, which is perhaps why he's not doing the one thing that really needs doing.
Nicotine has been considered too awful to be a pesticide in the US since 2014. A year earlier, the EU banned a raft of nicotine-containing agricultural sprays. Nicotine is what makes people smoke, and what makes them vape, and if you cut out the nicotine there'll be less of both. Plus the bees would be delighted.
There's every reason to ban smoking in the future to today's children. There's lots of good things that can be done to limit the appeal of vapes. But any Prime Minister serious about stopping the billions of pounds it all costs our NHS, stopping the criminalising of children, cracking down on illegal vapes and cigarettes, making the nation healthier in general and more able to get simple pleasure from an actual hug rather than a pretend one, has only to ban the nicotine.
Sell your cigarettes: without nicotine, no-one will want to keep smoking them. Package the vapes like a Twix for all I care; without nicotine, the children will realise it's a gaseous form of Pledge. Limit patches and vapes with nicotine to be prescription-only and medically supervised to wean addicts off the stuff, like we do with methadone, and give the nation its health and sanity back.
But he won't do that, because for every single year since Brexit the UK government has allowed the "emergency use" of neonicitinoid pesticides on British farmland despite the fact expert committees, the COP summits and everyone with a brain has yelled at them to stop doing so. Perhaps it's related to the fact these pesticides are commonly used by sugar beet farmers in East Anglia, home to the bluest of safe seats, and as Brexity as Boris Johnson's underpants. If Rishi banned nicotine being ingested by people, those same people might wonder why he's still spraying it on Norfolk.
Still, less than a year of this sort of crap to go. Let's hope when the next government is formed, whoever is in it can turn a blind, stupid bit of PR tarradiddle into something worthwhile. They certainly couldn't do much worse.