Threats of Illegal Vapes on Street in the UK. The rate at which illegal vapes sales to school children is on the rise in the UK tops the threats on the streets.
As as the time of the update, vapes that flout laws have been seized in hundreds of thousands.
And there is concern that cheap, brightly-coloured vapes are ending up in the hands of 12 and 13-year-olds.
The government said it was considering what more could be done to protect children from vaping.
To hear that these products could also be illegal and unregulated was “terrifying”, they added.
“When Trading Standards teams do spot checks on the sale of vaping products to kids, we find around one in three businesses break the law,”
Mobile phone shops, gift shops and convenience stores are among the shops found to be selling the devices to children.
UK laws limit how much nicotine and e-liquid is contained in vapes, and which health warnings are required on packaging.
In recent years, vapes and e-cigarettes have been a successful way of helping many people give up smoking.
More than 1.4 tonnes of illegal vapes were seized from shops in the second half of last year in North-East England.
One mother in Scotland, said that her 15-year-old daughter was sold disposable vapes illegally for months by her local corner shop.
“There would be certain points of the day where she could go in and buy them. She would have to wait for the shopkeeper to give her the nod.”
The woman said she was “angry” that corner shops would sell the devices to children “who are clearly under-age and in their school uniform”.
“I couldn’t work out why my daughter was getting nosebleeds, headaches and mood swings, and when I came across the vapes hidden in her bedroom I was shocked,” she said.
The girl told her mother she started vaping because all of her friends at school were doing it, and it got to the point where she was being picked on because she was not doing it.
She has now stopped vaping and feels much better for it, the mother said.
Vapes or e-cigarettes are far safer than normal cigarettes because they do not contain harmful tobacco, or produce dangerous tar or carbon monoxide from tobacco smoke.
However, health experts say they are not risk-free, and more research is needed to find out about their potential effects over many years.
They do contain nicotine – the substance which makes people addicted to smoking.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care in England said: “We have introduced tough regulations to deter the appeal of vaping to children, including restrictions on product advertising, setting limits on nicotine strength, labelling and safety requirements, and making it illegal to sell nicotine vapes to those aged under 18 years old.
“We are carefully considering the recommendations from areview: making smoking obsolete, including what more can be done to protect children from vaping.”
“We strongly advise children and young people against using illegal and unregulated e-cigarettes, and call on government and regulators to stop the sale of these products.”
She said plain packaging of e-cigarettes and nicotine and non-nicotine e-liquids should be introduced, as well as tighter restrictions on advertising of vaping products so they are only used as an aid to stopping smoking.
“If action is not taken soon, we run the risk of having generations of children addicted to nicotine,”
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