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COLIN CAMPBELL: Enthusiasm for vaping has fag-end similarity to 1960s





Vapes or cigarettes - or neither? Picture: iStock/AndreyPopov
Vapes or cigarettes - or neither? Picture: iStock/AndreyPopov

Highland Council used underage children to test whether shops would sell tobacco-related products to them and in 13 cases out of 52 the kids emerged with exactly what they'd asked for. Careless, negligent shop owners and assistants had flouted the rule that there should be no sale to under-18s.

That was bad enough. But when the results were broken down further it emerged there was a particular willingness among some to hand out vapes like they were candy.

The store owners were each fined £200 in what was described as a "crackdown". That was a crackdown with a pretty light touch and they were lucky to get away with it. We know how hard small shop owners in particular work and their efforts are appreciated, but there's no excuse for selling tobacco products to kids nowadays.

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Haven't they seen youngsters chugging away on vapes on every street corner and probably outside their stores as well? Doesn't it bother them? Do they want to be responsible for getting these kids hooked on nicotine for life?

Back in the 1960s, smoking was seen as a fashionable and stylish thing to do. Cigarettes were widely advertised and their use was integral to TV programmes and films. Warnings against them were non-existent. How absurd that seems now. Were so many people really so dumb back then to believe smoking was actually "cool", many would no doubt wonder. Were you really that stupid, grandad?

But with vaping there seems at least partial signs of history repeating itself. Stylishly dressed women and men in their 20s and 30s - who probably wouldn't be seen dead with a crummy, wheezy cigarette - walk around the city centre wreathed in clouds of vapour. And more and more people seem to be taking up the habit, or hobby as some would benignly see it.

A few years ago vaping was viewed in a positive light by health authorities, as "95 per cent safer than smoking". It was acknowledged that it might not be an entirely safe and healthy pursuit but that appeared as little more than a footnote.

But the needle has been shifting on vaping. And now there's much less emphasis on comparative smoking benefits and much more on the inherent risks of vaping. The warnings are clear. Vaping is damaging to the heart, blood vessels and circulation, and lungs.

I would be thoroughly dismayed if my youngest offspring took up vaping, almost as much as if they started smoking. But we know this is a growing scourge among so many young people.

I still remember the haze of glamour attached to smoking back in the 1960s, which seems so bizarre now. That era is nowadays portrayed with a mix of mockery and incredulity as a time when social attitudes on a range of issues were so puzzling and inexplicable as to almost be backward in their thinking, or lack of it.

But 60 years on, we now have another nicotine-related activity viewed in much the same way as smoking was back then, but for how long? It looks like another fashion that's living on borrowed time.


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