When my son started high school 2 years ago, he was smart, full of enthusiasm and absolutely loving his life to the full.

In a matter of days he succumbed to peer pressure, eager to impress older children and started to play around with vapes.

He admitted the fault and we had the talk about being responsible and making good decisions, however soon after he was found vaping…fast forward 2 years and now he has a reliance on these disposable devices.

The use of these devices are causing him to be late for school, avoiding school completely and getting into trouble with the police and even shoplifting. His once fantastic school reports are now pieces of paper that brings his parents to tears. We have daily reports from school about his behaviour, and it’s all down to him not being able to freely have access to his next vape.

He has no desire to stop vaping, and this has now lead on to smoking. Vaping is an absolutely huge problem in all uk high schools, and all the times we’ve found out about discovered vape devices, they have been obtained through peer pressure into shoplifting.

We’ve been fortunate speaking to some retailers convincing them to sell them behind the counter, or to display them in locked cabinets. This has seen a reduction in shoplifting of such devices, and made it more difficult for children to get hold of these child friendly deductive devices.

I propose that purchases of such devices to have similar restrictions in the point of sale to that of cigarettes, in that the devices should only be displayed in a locked display cabinet, or behind the sale counter to prevent theft, and more importantly to make it rightly difficult for children to obtain these devices which inevitably leads them down a path of self destruction.

Please back my campaign so we can put an end to the struggle of parents looking to keep their children safe and make good decisions by preventing them access to these devices until they’re of a mature enough age to make informed decisions without submitting to peer pressure