A UK-wide ban on vaping will come into effect on Saturday, May 31st. The ban applies to selling or supplying disposable vapes, in shops and online, but not to possessing the items.
In the build-up to enacting the legislation, the government—largely unopposed—has argued that the devices, initially intended to helps smokers to quit, are damaging the environment through littering (already a civil offence) and encouraging children to take up the habit (the products are already age-restricted).
Many of the earlier ‘child protection’ arguments from around the time of vapes first being introduced are now redeployed against adult vaping: bedazzled by brightly coloured packaging and seduced by fruit flavours, gormless adults take up the habit.
Compared to the known and demonstrable harms of cigarette tobacco smoking, vaping is a useful mechanism for people wanting to quit. The growth of large numbers of consumers who enjoy vapes separately from their health goals has scandalised successive technocratic British governments, bringing to mind H.L. Mencken’s famously characterisation of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Despite the shaky evidence to support the ban, its most likely immediate consequence will be the explosion of a black market in vapes, eventually matching the existing one in cigarettes—itself largely brought about through regulatory high taxes.
