New regulations taking effect today make it harder for companies and individuals to profit from selling nicotine products to children under 18, extending existing bans to nicotine pouches and non-nicotine vapes.
Selling nicotine vapes to children was already illegal. The new rules extend this ban to other nicotine products, including nicotine pouches, and to non-nicotine vapes. It is also now illegal for adults to buy such products with the intention of giving them to children.
Closing loopholes on free distribution
Some companies and individuals had been using legal loopholes to provide free distribution of these products, for example at festivals and events, in an effort to addict a new generation. This practice is no longer legal.
Nicotine, in any form, is highly addictive. Those promoting it to children aim to take away their choice through addiction, creating a lifelong, usually eventually unwilling, customer. Most people addicted to nicotine wish they had never started but find it very hard to stop.
Vaping as a harm-reduction tool
Vaping can help established adult smokers who are already addicted to tobacco nicotine to switch to a less dangerous product. While vaping is considered safer than smoking, that is a low bar, and vapes should never be used by children or non-smokers.
Some children have already come to harm from bad reactions to vapes. The long-term health harms of vaping in today's children will only become clear over time, but they are unlikely to be good, as inhaling multiple, often heated, chemicals into the lungs may well do irreversible harm.
Future measures under the Tobacco and Vapes Act
These changes were brought in by the Tobacco and Vapes Act, recently passed by Parliament on a cross-party basis. They are the start of several measures to be introduced in stages to make vaping and nicotine addiction much less easy to market to children.
The next major step will be the smoke-free generation, where anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never legally be sold cigarettes at any stage in their lives. The immense harm addiction to smoking does, from lung cancer through birth abnormalities, strokes, dementia and heart disease, will gradually become a thing of the past.
Protecting children from those who aim to addict them to nicotine or vapes has very wide public support, and the measures coming in today will help with this.
