Jess Battison
The UK has been ridden by epidemics these past few years. With Gen Z losing much of their younger years to their wrath.
They’ve lived through Covid lockdowns and now they’re swept up in the vapepidemic.
OK, OK, not all of Gen Z are vapers. Sure. But we all know at least a handful who vape.
Or only vape ‘when they’re drinking’. Either way, disposable vapes seem to be everywhere.
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And there’s even calls for the brightly-coloured pocket-friendly bars to be made illegal on both health and environmental grounds.
But that doesn’t seem to be stopping the Gen Zers (and let’s be really plenty of millennials and boomers are puffing on the fruity little things too) from buying them.
Polling for The Telegraph by Consumer Intelligence found one in four people aged 26 and under buy a new disposable vape every day.
Yes, every day.
And those puffs on mad blue or strawberry ice or triple melon (they do literally sound like sweets) add up to quite the price.
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Disposable vapes tend to be priced at an average of about £7.50 in the UK, and yet 13 percent of users aged 26 and below said they spend between £125 and £150 a month on the devices.
But this doesn’t quite work out, meaning they’ve no idea how much cash they’re blowing on the bars.
Based on that average price, those 25 percent of Gen Z respondents are spending around £225 a month on vaping. That’s a whopping approximate of £2,738 a year.
This all comes after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his plans to completely ban cigarettes.
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Announced at last week’s Conservative Party Conference, he plans to raise the smoking age by a year for every year, meaning a 14-year-old today will ‘never legally be sold a cigarette’.
Sunak claims smoking costs the UK £17 billion per year and is the single biggest avoidable problem facing the NHS.
He went on to explain why he was proposing the new legislation, which he promised would be subject to a ‘free’ vote in Parliament, allowing politicians to vote with their own preference, rather than be whipped into a certain vote by their party leadership.
Sunak said: "When we raised the smoking age to 18, smoking prevalence dropped by 30% in that age group.
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"When the United States raised the age to 21, the smoking rate dropped by 39% in that age group. Smoking places huge pressures on the NHS and costs our country £17bn a year.
"We have a chance to cut cancer deaths by a quarter, significantly ease those pressures and protect our children, and we should take it."