Watermelon bubble gum, blueberry sour raspberry, gummy bear, ginger cola… no, not some of the sugary treats on the shelves of your childhood sweet shop, but just a few of the flavours of electronic-cigarette liquids being bought across the country every single day.
Vaping, which is the inhaling of a vapour created by an e-cigarette, took hold in the UK in 2015, and has surged in popularity ever since. Both a smoking cessation tool and a habit in its own right, some 3.2 million adults use a vape regularly - compared with between 5.6 and 6.6 million adults who smoke cigarettes.
Now, a new government push will look to reverse those numbers and turn smokers into vapers, with the ambition to make England a smoker-free country by 2030.
One in five smokers will be sent a vape starter kit as part of the national scheme, and offered behavioural support to help them stub out the habit. Pregnant women addicted to cigs will be given up to £400 in vouchers as an incentive to quit, as smoking during pregnancy heightens the risk of miscarriage and can damage lung and brain tissue in unborn babies.
But it wasn’t that long ago questions were being asked about the potential long-term risks of vaping, which are still largely unknown. Using vape pens can cause throat and mouth irritation, headaches and coughs in users, while the nicotine found in them is a stimulant that increases heart rate and can constrict blood vessels, preventing nutrients from getting to the skin. This leads to premature ageing, and can even increase the risk of heart attacks.
However, experts agree that vaping is far preferable to smoking in terms of the health implications, and, according to Public Health England, 95% less harmful to health than normal cigarettes.
Dr Lion Shahab, Professor of Health Psychology and co-director of the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group at University College London, says: “E-cigs are significantly less harmful than cigarettes because the key difference is there is no combustion going on. And combustion is the thing that makes cigarettes so harmful.
“When you burn tobacco it creates more chemicals, and many of those are carcinogenic. Whereas in e-cigarettes, you heat an e-liquid, which has fewer chemicals in it and there’s no tobacco in it, it’s just nicotine.”
By law you must be 18 or over to buy e-cigs or the flavoured liquids used inside them to produce the vapour. But the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health has raised concerns of a looming vaping “epidemic” among underage teens, with NHS numbers from 2021 showing nearly one in ten 11- to 15-year-olds have already tried an e-cigarette.
While promoting e-products is strictly prohibited, the use of bright colours and all those sweet flavours mean children are more likely to be attracted to e-cigs, leading to calls from England’s chief medical officer Prof Sir Chris Witty to “try everything we can” to reduce vaping among under-18s.
Health expert Prof Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London, believes the government plans are “good news for public health”.
“Vaping poses only a small fraction of the risks of smoking,” he says. “This is because most chemicals responsible for the health risks of smoking are absent, and the few that remain are massively reduced. Chemicals specific to vaping are not known to pose any major health risks.”
Vaping also has a slower nicotine delivery mechanism compared with cigarettes, and as such has less addictive potential. “Among people who try one cigarette, over half progress to daily smoking, while daily vaping among non-smokers is rare,” says Professor Hajek.
Staying entirely smoke-free, of course, will always be the healthiest option. “Nobody would advocate a non-smoker to start vaping as it’s meant to be for smokers who struggle with other methods to quit,” says Prof Shahab.
There’s also a concern that early exposure to nicotine will lead to dependency.
“We know that nicotine is more reinforcing when you start using it younger. The latest studies have shown that if people start smoking cigarettes in their mid-20s, they will never become as addicted as somebody who started smoking in their teens.”
The environmental impact of e-cigarettes have also caused concern. Disposable vapes, which can last as little as 500 puffs, are designed to be single-use, meaning that unless they are properly disposed of, hazardous chemical waste, plastic and lithium batteries can just be dumped into the environment.
With the price of disposable e-cigs as little as £5, who actually makes the money? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Big Tobacco has its fingers in the vaping pies too. British American Tobacco - the biggest tobacco company in Europe, owns Vype, which sold 344 million e-cig units in 2020, while the popular blu e-cigarette is owned by British tobacco company Imperial Brands.
Their profits look set to rocket even further, as according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, the UK’s vaping sector was worth a whopping £1.325bn in 2021 alone - up by £251m from 2017.
The vaping surge has also been good news to certain small businesses. Amjid Bashir, who owns Newsbox newsagents in Glasgow, told Radio 5 Live’s Wake Up To Money that e-cigs have been a “lifeline” to his business - “especially after Covid where we’re seeing footfall drastically reduced due to people still working from home, the changing pattern of people buying online,” he explained.
“If it hadn’t been for the advent of these disposable vapes, many businesses like mine would have collapsed.
“We’ve got a huge turnover of our sales due to tobacco sales, up to 70%. With traditional tobacco sales, you’re talking about profits of 6-7%. Now 50% of those sales are due to disposable vapes, where the profit margin is 50%, so you can imagine the huge impact it’s had on our business, making it more profitable and making us more survivable.”
He added: “About 18 months ago I had my business up for sale at a fraction of the price it was worth, due to the fact I couldn’t survive, but a year and a half down the line, not only am I surviving but I’ve been able to recruit more people.”
