Generation Vape - how London’s teens became hooked

The first time I tried vaping I was 13,” says 17-year-old Ron Harris. “It wasn’t that common, I just did it because someone offered it to me. But some people in my class started doing it in Year 6 [ages 10-11].” Among Generation Z, vaping has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the past year. In fact, according to a survey by Action on Smoking and Health, the number of 11- to 18-year-olds who’ve taken up the habit has doubled in just 12 months. Some schools have even reported that children as young as seven are vaping.

Although some of Ron’s peers have been vaping for a few years, it wasn’t until last summer that he noticed the trend really begin to take off.

“I don’t know what happened [during that summer] but that’s when loads of my friends started vaping, especially the disposables. There’s a vape shop I’ve used which is all bright colours and different flavours, it’s open really late and you never get ID’d — it makes [vapes] so easy to buy,” he says. “I’d say around 70 per cent of my year group vape now.”

According to the Action on Smoking and Health report, disposable e-cigarettes may be behind this sharp rise in teens vaping. As the study points out, these are “the most used product among current vapers, up more than seven-fold from seven per cent in 2020... to 52 per cent in 2022. Elf Bar and Geek Bar are overwhelmingly the most popular, with only 30 per cent of current users having tried any other brands.” The myriad flavours as well as the low prices — they retail for around £5 — attract young people. They can also be purchased with just a few clicks from online retailers.

Fears over the desirability of vaping have been rife for years. While a ban on advertising for tobacco products has been in place since the Nineties, there are fewer restrictions on vaping. Billboards and buses tease the hundreds of flavours and colours — from doughnut to watermelon — that young people can choose from and manufacturers are now sponsoring football and Formula One teams.

On social media, “haul” videos showing influencers unwrapping huge packages of vaping products, posting reviews and trying out impressive tricks regularly attract hundreds of thousands of views.

Teenagers post videos matching their vape pens to their outfits — turning e-cigarettes into fashion accessories in popular “get ready with me” style videos. The hashtag #elfbar, referencing the Chinese-owned vaping giant, currently has 1.2 billion views on TikTok, while #vaping has 2.1 billion views. “You see all these people on social doing cool tricks with vapes and I thought: ‘I want to do that’”, Charlie Morris, Ron’s 18-year-old classmate explains. “That’s why I started, plus all my friends were doing it.”

Earlier this year, an investigation by The Observer alleged that Elf Bar, now the most popular vape brand in the UK, was flouting TikTok’s advertising rules by paying influencers to promote their brand. The videos — many of which have hundreds of thousands of views — are not age restricted and are not always clearly marked as ads. (Elf Bar denied the claims, and said it adhered to Advertising Standards Authority regulations on vape advertising).

Among Ron and Charlie’s teenage peers, the vast majority of those who vape never smoked in the first place. “I don’t know anyone my age really that smokes cigarettes…but literally everyone vapes,” says Charlie. Indeed, smoking has been on the decline in the UK for years. But the rise in vaping has sparked concerns among health experts that, rather than preventing people from smoking, vapes could act as a gateway by encouraging a long-term nicotine addiction. “At first, I could probably go a week or so without it, but now, if I don’t vape for a while I start to get in a sh*t mood,” Charlie says. “I’m vaping every few hours. It’s 100 per cent an addiction. If I could stop today and not have any withdrawal symptoms, I would.”

Vaping is now worth more than £1 billion in the UK. A decade ago, there was a flurry of tobacco company investment into e-cigarette brands. By 2018, all the major firms had launched flagship e-cigarette brands. Since then, brightly coloured vape shops have mushroomed along Britain’s high streets, and the global market for vapes has increased 8,000-fold.

Public Health England’s claim that vaping is 95 per cent safer than smoking has been criticised by some medical experts. While e-cigarettes do not contain the dangerous tar of conventional cigarettes, some studies from the US Centre for Disease Control suggest they are associated with cardiac and neurological diseases as well as impacting on brain development for young people.