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By Mali Sapsed Foster
While the numbers of tobacco smokers is slowly dwindling, electronic cigarettes and vapes are now more popular than ever among youth – with almost one in five 15-year-olds using e-cigarettes in 2021.
This is according to a survey by NHS Digital, which also suggests that 9% of 11-15-year-olds have admitted to vaping – a 2% increase from 2018.
“I started vaping when I was 14,” claimed Laila Canaan, an eighteen-year-old Archway resident who declined to be interviewed on camera. “All my friends started and they’re cheap, taste good too.”
She later admitted to having finished a whole Elf Bar vape in one night, which is typically equivalent to around 48 cigarettes, noting: “It was easily done.”
The battery-operated devices initially modelled after regular cigarettes were invented in 2003 by Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik in an attempt to serve as an alternative to smoking tobacco.
Now developed into brightly packaged and artificially flavoured bars, sales of disposable vape have seen a massive boom in sales here in the UK – growing 883% between May 2021 and May 2022 according to retailer The Vape Club.
According to GOV UK, the majority of young people who have tried vaping is due to their curiosity – with just over a third of 11 to 15-year-olds thinking it would be all right to try them.
The candy-coloured bars are a hit with young people and social media – with hundreds of thousands of results when searching the vaping hashtag, or big vaping brand companies like Lost Mary or Elf Bar, on social media apps like Instagram and TikTok.
Many young people are turning to vapes as a fashionable accessory, glamorised by social media.
“I sometimes pick my vape to match my outfit, I think it’s kind of a trend now,” Canaan admitted.
The multi-coloured vapes may look innocent, but like cigarettes, are culpable for many lung-related health issues – and even deaths.
In conversation with the BBC, Public Health England health improvement director Professor John Newton admitted the recent outbreak of serious lung illnesses “was strongly linked to people vaping illicit liquids containing vitamin-E acetate” – which is a common ingredient of vapes and e-cigarettes manufactured in the United States.
In the US, Vitamin-E acetate has been linked to EVALI – a serious medical condition in which a person’s lungs become severely damaged. There were 68 deaths and over 2,800 hospitalisations recorded by the CDC across North America by February 2020.
Although Vitamin-E acetate is a banned component in the development of e-cigarettes and vapes in the UK, there have been two cases of death due to lung injury caused potentially by the use of vaping in the past year.
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