Under-18 sales ban on nicotine products and all vapes
Chief Medical Officer responds to restrictions on the sale and promotion of vapes and nicotine products
Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, said:
Aiming to addict children and young people under 18 to nicotine of any kind or encouraging them to vape sets them up for lifelong health harms, and is completely unacceptable. New regulations coming in today should make it harder for people and companies to try to make a profit from trying to do this.
Selling nicotine vapes to children is already illegal. The new regulations extend this to other nicotine products, including nicotine pouches and to non-nicotine vapes. They also make it illegal for adults to buy products with the aim of giving them to children.
Some companies and individuals have been using loopholes in the law to provide free distribution, for example at festivals and events, to try to addict a new generation. This will no longer be legal.
Nicotine, of any form, is highly addictive. Those promoting it to children aim to take away their choice through that addiction. This can create a lifelong, usually eventually unwilling, customer. Most people addicted to nicotine wish they had never started, but find it very hard to stop.
Vaping can be a way to help established adult smokers who are already addicted to nicotine from tobacco to swap to a less dangerous product. Vaping is considered safer than smoking, but that is a low bar. Vapes should therefore 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. They are however unlikely to be good; inhaling multiple, often heated, chemicals into the lungs may well do irreversible harm.
These changes to the law 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 is something which has very wide public support. The measures which are coming in today will help with this.