The summer is meant to be a time for carefree fun. However, Labour is doing its best to spoil it for vapers and people who plan to quit smoking. Citing fears over teen use, Labour will ban disposables in 2025, leaving millions of UK vapers without their favourite device.
Keir Starmer promised to bring a lot of change on the election trail. However, the benefits of this policy are vastly outweighed by the harm.
Let’s take a look at the top five reasons why a disposable vape ban is just another bad and unimaginative policy.
Disposables are instrumental in helping smokers quit
It’s no coincidence the mainstream emergence of vapes has dramatically impacted smoking rates in the UK. As awareness and availability of more user-friendly and cost-effective devices rose, giving up smoking became easier. Now that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, we’ve gotten closer to the bedrock of smokers who are very reluctant to quit. Disposable vapes have helped this category of people because they’re:
- Less than half the price of a box of cigarettes.
- Charged and ready to go out of the box.
- Satisfying to use because nic salts deliver nicotine quickly.
- Widely available.
Convenience is a huge factor in moving people who don’t really want to smoke onto safer alternatives.
Disposables are important for people with dexterity issues
As mentioned above, disposable vapes are accessible, easy to use, and cost-effective. While most people don’t struggle to operate more complex devices, dexterity is an issue for 11.15% of the UK’s disabled population. In other words, a significant number of people in the UK benefit from the user-friendly design of disposables. While draw-activated pods can do a roughly similar job, it’s not hard to imagine cases where an even simpler alternative is required.
It’s great news for black-market criminals
Cocaine and weed aren’t sold in newsagents, but if teens want them, they’re readily available. Clearly, prohibiting an item doesn’t do much to change demand. Additionally, it’s already illegal for teens to buy vapes, disposable or not.
So, what are the routes that teens use to get disposable cigarettes that will be shut down by this ban? They’ll still be available from friends, unscrupulous shopkeepers, and social media accounts. The only difference is that the products will be unregulated.
Black market vapes already exist in this country. The people who import this contraband know that demand will still exist. Now, they’ll just have an excuse to put their prices up.
Legitimate businesses will take a hit on revenues, and the HMRC will get less tax, but criminals are the main beneficiaries of this ban.
Smoking prevalence could increase among teens and adults
While you wouldn’t know it from listening to the media, the average age of disposable vape users is 39. In 2019, the UK smoking rate was around 16%. In the last five years, that number has dipped almost 12%. Coincidentally, that was around the time of the emergence of disposable vapes.
They have been instrumental in reducing adult smoking rates by providing a user-friendly product that requires zero technical knowledge. So, it’s not just the people who would have given up in the future that we need to think about; it’s also the people who did give but will return to former habits.
It speaks to a lack of imagination
The only semi-reasonable argument for banning disposables is that they produce a lot of waste that is hard to recycle. Yet, there are lots of products that have clear utility that aren’t simple to recycle, such as deodorant, toothbrushes, smartphones, and so on.
There were lots of alternative pathways here. It just required someone with a little imagination. For example, why not try a recycling exchange program? They’ve been really successful in many European countries for cans and bottles.
Other than that, there have been various disposables, like the Riot Squad QBAR, which was made from bioplastics and advertised as the “world's first carbon-negative disposable e-cigarette.”
The other thing to consider is that the 10 tonnes of lithium being thrown away annually is the equivalent of about 1,200 electric cars — which isn’t huge in the grand scheme of things. Research suggests that only 17% of vapes are recycled correctly. It’s a surmountable problem that could produce quick wins.
Final thoughts
The vape market is innovative. While the government and health bodies were wasting money on quit-smoking posters, it stepped in with a quantifiably effective solution to the problem of smoking-related death and illness.
As usual, the government couldn’t just stay out of the way. Now, its meddling will lead to fewer people quitting, a significant portion of users returning to cigarettes, more hardship for people with dexterity issues, and a rise in black market activity.
Hopefully, vape manufacturers in Shenzhen will find some innovative workaround to this unreasonable legislation, just like they did with shortfill e-liquids or the newer breed of disposables that hold more than 2ml of juice.
It’s a sad state of affairs when manufacturers on the other side of the world are doing more to positively impact harm reduction than our sitting government.
