Today's Herald posted my letter today about why raising the smoking age is just a way of avoiding dealing with the scandal of nicotine addiction of teens because of Disposable vaping.
POLITICS is said to be the art of smoke and mirrors. Rishi Sunak’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference to copy New Zealand and put the age for smoking up by a year, each year, in England ("SNP under pressure to follow Rishi Sunak's vow to phase out smoking", heraldscotland, October 4) came out of the blue. At first glance, it looks like a good way to stop children from ever starting smoking. There was no consultation with Wales, Scotland or Ireland about this.
Sadly, this badly thought-out, headline-grabbing plan in no way addresses the fact that, hidden in the clouds of vaping, our children are, like the smokers of the past, inhaling vast quantities of the highly addictive stimulant drug, nicotine. The new drug misuse trend is the cheap and attractively designed, child-friendly, disposable single-use vapes. They contain quantities of nicotine far higher than many cigarettes. The World Health Organization reports that one in three child vapers are becoming cigarette smokers. That should be no surprise to anyone, as we have known for decades that Big Tobacco, which owns most of the vaping industry, has planned for decades ways to replace the quitting adult smokers with a new generation of nicotine addicts.
In Scotland alone, it is estimated that 51,000 under-16s are vaping. Most of them use the cheapest vapes costing £4.99 or less. If they buy two of them a week, in one year that will cost them £519. That apparently-small sum generates an income to Big Tobacco of £26.5 million from the 51,000 young Scottish vapers. That translates into around £260 million in the UK.
In the smoke and mirrors of Mr Sunak’s plan to stop children smoking, he omitted to tell us that his Conservative Party recently accepted a donation of £350,000 from one of the biggest vaping companies in the UK, Supreme 8, owned by Sandeep Singh Chadha, the chief executive of Supreme PLC. This is one of the companies complicit in addicting our children to nicotine.
If our PM were serious about wanting to stop children becoming addicted to nicotine, he would have completely banned disposable single-use vapes. That simple action would not have cost the Government one penny. It would stop Big Tobacco using our children as nicotine mules to sustain their profits. It would also stop the dumping of five million hard-to-recycle disposable vapes.
Max Cruickshank, Glasgow.