The case for vapes

What is it about the Left and their desperation to ban stuff? Because they can? Because it is there? Because — dread thought — someone out there might just be having a good time?

Last week, Jack McConnell, the last First Minister of Scotland who was not a Nationalist — like most failed Labour pols, he has since changed his first name to Lord — howled, in a column for the Enlightenment think-tank, for a ban on vaping indoors.

It is, one feels, less rage McConnell feels than nostalgia. Practically the only achievement one remembers from his 2001 to 2007 stretch in office, was the ban on indoor smoking in public places decreed from April 2006.

To the ruination of pubs and to finger-wagging signs even on en plein air railway platforms. It was not even McConnell’s own idea: it was first pitched, in 2002, in Scottish politics by an SNP MSP, Kenny Gibson — now Presiding Officer at Holyrood — and the Irish decreed smokeless pubs first, in 2004.

But a prohibition of vaping? Let us glance at its history, and the pharmacology.

Back in 2003 Hon Lik, 52, a gentle pharmacist from Shenyang, China, was desperate to stop smoking. 

The habit had killed his father, but nothing seemed to work. Once, Hon fell asleep after forgetting to peel off his nicotine patches and had dreadful nightmares. Might it not be better to think of some enjoyable way to deliver the hit? 

So, he came up with a pen-shaped device rather resembling a cigarette, using — if you might forgive the technobabble — a piezoelectric ultrasound element to vaporise nicotine solution into gratifyingly inhalable clouds. And thus invented electronic cigarettes. 

Hon was smart enough to patent it not locally, but in America, and sold on his patents to a Dutch division of Imperial Tobacco. Boffins made one tweak: battery-powered heating elements were better, and cheaper.  

The first commercial vape-sticks were manufactured in Shenyang in 2004. By 2009, they were being touted in British shopping-centres and, by 2015, vaping had gone supernova.  

Cleaner, far cheaper than smoking, the “juice” available in a giddying range of flavours — and, in 2014, after expert analysis, Public Health England declared vaping “up to 95% safer than smoking.”

In May 2016, the Tobacco Products Directory arrived, to ensure high standards of safety and quality for all vaping products — and, from May 2017, all non-compliant juices and devices were banned. 

Indeed, Britain has one of the strictest regulatory schemes in the world. That hasn’t stopped periodic shrieks from “public health” authorities and commentators that vapes are a “gateway” drug, or that the industry deliberately targets children. That it may give you “popcorn lung,” or that vape-sticks keep exploding and hurting people. 

And then there is downright fantastic: that vape-juice contains antifreeze, formaldehyde, embalming fluid…  There was particular fuss earlier this month in the Daily Telegraph over the extraordinary concentration of vape-shops in Preston, Lancs.

The favoured juice locally, gloomily confides our reporter, is “Hayati’s Blue Razz Gummy Bear. It feels like we’re sitting inside a bag of Haribo…”

“We’ve kind of promoted vaping as being safe,” frets Dr Syed Megdi of Royal Preston Hospital, “But actually, no, it’s not. The fact is, as soon as you start introducing anything like this into your lungs it causes damage which can lead to cancer risk or other changes. It should be totally discouraged, to be honest…”

Is he correct? And should it not be pondered in the context of a Labour Government determined to discourage — yes, ban — all sorts of things, from trail-hunting to tumble-dryers — and, perhaps, furious that what has proved most effective in weaning hundreds of thousands of Brits off their cancer-sticks was conjured up not by the NHS, but the free market?

Over a decade ago, on Saturday 18th October 2014 — after many attempts, over decades, to break a two-pack-a-day habit — I stamped out my last fag, and dolefully unpacked my newly acquired Aspire e-cigarette kit. 

I never smoked again. Everyone soon commented on how pink I now looked. My vision, energy and even hearing improved within days. I have had no negative health consequences whatsoever. Two 10 ml bobbles of juice — £3.99 each locally — last me a week. 

Let us remember how dreadfully dangerous smoking is. Two-thirds of all smokers will be killed by the habit. Its hecatombs include four kings, no less: Edward VII, George V, the sometime Edward VIII and George VI all died of smoking-related illness. Smoking causes strokes, heart disease and blindness. Lung cancer apart, it is also implicated in cancer of the mouth, jaw, throat, oesophagus and, unexpectedly, the bladder. 

 Commissioned to write a history, some years ago, of my old school in Glasgow, I was shaken to find how few puffing teachers I could recall were still alive. Of the six deceased Jordanhill headmasters by 2018, at least four had died, like their sometime Sovereigns, of smoking-related illness.  

That’s before we even start on those slain in smoking-related house fires. Or in the 1985 Bradford stadium disaster, and the 1987 Kings Cross station blaze — attributed respectively to discarded cigarette-ends and one smoker’s lit, dropped match.  

This is not to patronise. The link with lung cancer was not identified till the Fifties; cigarettes were advertised on television as late as 1964. Churchill had his cigar, Harold Wilson his pipe; Princess Margaret her elegant tortoiseshell cigarette-holder. 

 The habit was normal and, from a child’s perspective fifty years ago, near-universal. Guests from W H Auden to Bette Davis puffed madly away on TV chat-shows. Teachers took a furtive drag in corridors. Men even smoked outside church.  

 What Hon Lik grasped was that nicotine — not even a carcinogen — is the least dangerous element in cigarette smoke

Throughout that 1973 hit, The Day of the Jackal, a cigarette droops near-permanently from Edward Fox’s lips. Dot Cotton, in EastEnders, never seemed without one: as late as 1995, the complicated young characters of This Life, when not having sex like crazed weasels, puffed away in the office. 

 What Hon Lik grasped was that nicotine — not even a carcinogen — is the least dangerous element in cigarette smoke. The assassins are the fellow-passengers: carbon monoxide, tar, wood-alcohol, mercury and, yes, formaldehyde. 

Isolate nicotine instead, add it to a solution of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine (both used in many pharmaceutical products, and even foodstuffs) and drop in your chosen flavouring. 

None of this is used in embalming; many juices now sold contain no nicotine at all; and ever more nicotine in today’s brew is now produced synthetically, not from tobacco. 

This is no puff-piece for the industry. I shudder when I see children vaping, I loathe littered disposable vapes — and it is difficult to argue, in principle, against the duty to be imposed on vape juice from November.

But we can knock some myths on the head. No case of broncholitis obliterans (“popcorn lung”) has ever been diagnosed in a vaper. An ingredient fingered for the possibility — diacetyl — has been banned from e-liquid since 2016. 

As for its averred seduction of teenagers, smoking rates among all demographics have been in steady decline for many years now. 

The battery in an e-cig is no more apt to explode than the battery in your mobile; a far greater fire-hazard is a mobile-phone charger, live and plugged in with no attached device.  

The temperature at which propylene glycol could break down into formaldehyde is higher than any e-cig could ever reach.  

 While propylene glycol is often added to antifreeze, meanwhile — to make it safer if swallowed — it is also in hair conditioner, hand sanitiser, eyedrops, bottled coffee drinks, frozen dairy desserts and canned whipped cream. Are the bodies piled high? 

True war on smoking began with New Labour from 1997, and while we can point to assorted wheezes, from Scotland’s 2006 indoor-spaces ban to the imposition of dung-coloured packaging and entire prohibition of advertising, the chief weapon has been taxation. 

As late as 1998 you could still buy a pack of twenty for £2.49. Tesco now charges £16.05 for the budget-brand I have in mind (and cannot legally name.) 

No wonder that 5.6 million people in Britain now vape — and only 3.5 per cent of them never smoked. So, why all the clutching of pearls? 

“Passing a controversial law such as the smoking ban against well-funded opposition,” pants Jack McConnell of past glories, “required a great deal of working across party and sector lines.

“The new Scottish Government, and its public health minister Maree Todd, should lead discussions examining the potential of a ban on the use of vapes indoors and strengthening protections for children while punishing those who are exploiting young users.”

We must suspect some degree of snobbery. James Lawley, the Gent Z influencer, insists vaping is not for gentlemen — though he, absurdly, enthuses about manly cigars. 

Vaping did not emerge from government agencies, some politician’s ingenuity, the public sector or Big Pharm

In Scotland — much as Presbyterian ministers attacked Italian ice-cream outlets, back in Edwardian times, as portals into sensuous godlessness — vape-shops are often, like Turkish barber-shops, slammed as possible fronts for organised crime.

Angela Rayner has been widely mocked for her vape habit, as if it were up there with Burberry baseball caps, paper napkins and stone cladding.

But I suspect that many bewail what has proved the most effective aid to quit cigarettes ever devised because vaping did not emerge from government agencies, some politician’s ingenuity, the public sector or Big Pharm. 

 Rather, it was the product of a quiet man in Shenyang — and the unfailing ingenuity of private enterprise.