Meeting of the Parliament 31 January 2023 [Draft]
I thank Siobhian Brown for bringing the debate to the chamber. Given the length of the debate and the number of people who want to speak in it, it is clear that we are debating an issue of real concern, and it is one that I have spoken about before.
It does not seem that long ago that, in meetings in my office, vaping companies were lobbying me to support them. It was a great surprise to them that I was very strongly against universal access. They thought that I would support them because vapes were being marketed as a tool to quit smoking, which is the one area in which I would support their use. I was very interested to hear Stephanie Callaghan talk about her experiences. I would support the use of vaping as a medical intervention that has been recommended by medical professionals.
I well remember asking one particular vaping company, “Who owns the company?” Of course, I knew that the owner was a tobacco company, so the question that I put was, “Are you really suggesting that tobacco companies are producing these products to help their customers to stop using their products and, therefore, put themselves out of business?” By that logic, once they had helped every smoker to quit, there would be no need for any of their products. If vapes are solely for smoking cessation, why are there so many flavours and additives to draw in potential users? I informed the company that I was not that gullible.
Everything that I was concerned about back then has manifested itself and then some. I have a daughter who is in secondary school, and I am shocked at the level of vaping activity among pupils. There seems to be anecdotal evidence that as much as half the student population has tried or is regularly using vaping products. Moreover, there is a whole microindustry around the buying and selling of such products by students in schools—evidence of that is the quantity of products that is confiscated daily by the campus policeman. More significantly, the number of students who smoke tobacco or marijuana or even worse remains high and is climbing.
Vaping is a door to addiction and a step towards using those more harmful products, rather than its marketed use for smoking cessation. Siobhian Brown’s motion makes the very important point that vaping is not without harm, and that harm is yet to be properly quantified. My fear is that we are simply storing up a health crisis for the next generation. Inhaling foreign particles into our lungs cannot be anything but harmful on some level. That is blindingly obvious.
We need to regulate the use of vapes much more effectively and keep them out of the hands of schoolchildren. The marketing budgets of tobacco firms are being used to entice entirely new users into using vapes and then on to even more harmful products. For those who use them, their use is a habit as well as a social statement. Peer pressure is a key driver and, after all, it is not really smoking, is it? In addition, there are all those wonderful flavours, including bubble-gum flavour, for goodness sake—yes, that is really aimed at adults who want to quit. It is too easy for pupils to be drawn in and then make the step to the next level of substance abuse.
I agree that there is a place for vapes in the drive to help with smoking cessation. However, they should need to be prescribed by a health professional; at the very least, we should make the penalties for selling to underage pupils so high that it becomes not worth the risk. We need to take the issue extremely seriously before we have another health crisis on our hands.
I again thank Siobhian Brown for giving us the opportunity to raise the issue in the strongest possible way and to urge our Governments to take the appropriate urgent action to get such products out of the hands of our children.
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