Vaping has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently. Glasgow’s Union Street train station went up in flames and had to be demolished after a nearby vape shop caught fire. A Channel 4 investigation found that children in Dudley are being groomed by the owners of vape shops and mini-marts who allegedly offer them free e-cigarettes for “sexual favours”. And, according to The Sun, young people in Kent are being hospitalised with meningitis after sharing vapes.
The connection with meningitis is pure speculation and eye-witness accounts suggest that the fire in Glasgow was more likely to have been the result of faulty wiring than e-cigarette batteries, but it is all grist to the anti-vaping mill. The sexual exploitation of children is very much illegal, as is selling vapes to people under the age of 18. The plague of dodgy mini-marts, barbers and vape shops is familiar to anyone who lives in a British town or city. The authorities are only starting to get to grips with the legal shenanigans that allow shops to change hands every few months and evade tax, but tax evasion, counterfeit tobacco and underage sales are already illegal. All that is missing is enforcement.
To some people, however, the solution is simple: “just ban vapes”. This is the spiral of stupidity that has led us to where we are. In Scotland, unlike England, companies have to be on a government register to sell vapes. The shop in Glasgow was not on it and, despite being next door to Scotland’s busiest train station, no one seems to have noticed. Nor had it paid any business rates, but that didn’t stop it passing an inspection from Glasgow City Council’s trading standards team. No amount of legislation can compensate for poor governance.
The idea of banning vapes to stop the illegal sale of vapes is so idiotic that even the government is not seriously considering it. It would mean that the UK’s five million vapers would only be able to get hold of e-cigarettes on the black market. Things will be bad enough after the government doubles the price of vaping in October with its new vape tax without going full prohibition, but the “ban it harder” mentality always seems to prevail. It is this kind of displacement politics that paves the road to anarcho-tyranny. You want to tackle systematic child exploitation in the Midlands? Sorry mate, the best I can do is regulation of vape flavours.
Australia, as ever, has taken things to tragicomic extremes. In the latest episode of its ongoing tobacco turf war, a gunman opened fire in a Melbourne shisha café this week, injuring a 49 year old man. In Melbourne alone, there have been over 130 arson attacks and several murders since the tobacco and vape market fell into the hands of organised crime. E-cigarettes have always been illegal in Australia and it has the highest cigarette taxes in the world. According to official estimates, between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of tobacco products are now sold on the black market.
On Thursday, a government minister came up with a brilliant new ruse to put an end to this: banning tobacconists. “Health advocates are doing interesting work”, he said, “asking why our society continues to permit standalone tobacconists.” Would those be the same “health advocates” who got Australia into this mess? The ones who swore on a stack of Bibles that there is no link between tobacco taxes and the illicit trade? The ones who lobbied for e-cigarettes to be banned in the first place and who successfully lobbied for the ban to be extended to nicotine-free vapes and imports for personal use? Sure, let’s hear what those guys have to say.
Alas, it is thanks to those very “health advocates” that cigarettes are sold under the counter in Australia. As in Britain, it is against the law for shops to put tobacco products on display and so it is impossible to tell the difference between a tobacconist and a shop that happens to sell tobacco. Once you add sky-high cigarette taxes and the full prohibition of vapes into the mix, it is difficult to imagine a better regulatory environment for the black market to thrive, but banning legitimate retailers from selling tobacco would be the icing on the cake.
