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REBECCA BAIRD: My overblown war on vaping

Rebecca Baird thinks disposable vapes should be banned because they are unsustainable - and silly-looking. Image: DC Thomson.
Rebecca Baird thinks disposable vapes should be banned because they are unsustainable - and silly-looking. Image: DC Thomson.

Vapes are contentious for all sorts of reasons, but my biggest bugbear with them? They’re just really lame.

The electronic cigarettes have been in the news again this week, thanks to Dundee recycling campaigner Laura Young, who is calling for a ban on disposable vapes in Scotland. 

I agree with her wholeheartedly, albeit her reasons – the environmental impact of single-use electronics and the fire risk from disposing of them in general waste bins – are much more noble than mine.

I just think vaping looks ridiculous.

No one is more deeply uncool to me than the grown adult sooking at their silly wee whirring pen and letting off clouds of sickly-sweet smog wherever they go.

I see them – my own loved ones included – patting their pockets, panicked, like a child looking for a lost teddy, and it makes me feel a disproportionate and uncharacteristic level of contempt.

The incessant vape-to-hand attachment is at best irritating and at worst downright rude.

We tell teenagers off for mindlessly scrolling on their phones, yet sit in adult company with people who are constantly flicking, fidgeting and fellating their favourite toy mid-conversation.

Infuriating.

Moreover, vapers seem to think they are exempt from the agreed-upon social norms of smoking.

No cigarette smoker in 2023 would walk into someone else’s house, or a public space such as a bus, bar or shop, and expect to light up.

Passive smoking is a thing, so they’d go outside, as is polite.

Dundee woman Laura Young has launched a petition to get disposable vapes banned in Scotland. Image: Joanna Bremner/DC Thomson.

But since the ‘vapour’ is currently seen as unharmful (this is my sceptical face) and there’s no ash to fall, people seem to think a quick wee draw of a vape is alright in ‘No Smoking’ zones.

As someone with chronically crap lungs that like to be inflamed by so much as a goose fart in the fog a mile away, it really grates on me.

Especially since my (involuntary, but unapologetic) coughing draws dirty looks in response, as if I’m the one in the wrong for being (I admit) passive aggressive.

Excuse me for not wanting to perfume my clothes and hair with the settling stink of your Bubblegum Blast on my way to work, Vapey McVaperson.

‘Just smoke a real cigarette’

I know this amount of vitriol is unfounded, but we all have our things.

And each time I see someone inhaling a walkie-talkie and exhaling a burst exhaust, something in me wants to scream: ‘Just smoke a real cigarette!’

After all, if you’re going to suffer the indignity of a nicotine addiction, you might as well not look like a sci-fi tosspot while doing so.

And despite all those campaigns we got at school, we all know at our big age that smoking does, in fact, look quite cool.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, with her signature cigarette holder, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Image: Shutterstock.

You know it, I know it, the French always knew it and your doctor knows it too.

I’m not encouraging smoking, by the way. It’s really, really bad for you. I don’t do it myself, so I can be all smug and sanctimonious either way.

But put it this way – you’d never see someone vaping on an album cover, would you?

And if I’m going to be subjected someone else’s gaseous backwash, I’d rather it was plain old bad blue smoke than the plasticky oil which coats tongue and teeth, and makes all your food taste of Vanilla Surprise for the rest of the day.

Vaping is now a vice all its own

Vapes started out as an alternative to smoking, and at first they seemed like a good answer – less harmful smoke, an economical transition for smokers looking to quit, and an environmentally-friendly electronic option that would lessen litter by lasting longer than a pack of cigs.

Vaping just doesn’t have the ‘cool’ factor in Rebecca’s eyes. Image: DC Thomson.

But with the creation of disposable pens, they’ve established themselves as a halfway decent vice, rather than a harmless copycat gadget, with all the same social and environmental trappings – and the health ones in the post.

Ultimately, we’re all going to die of something, and I don’t believe in using people’s own mortality to convince them out of a habit. If that worked, no one would do anything fun.

I just simply cannot take you seriously if you’re chuffing away like Thomas The Tank Engine, it’s too silly.

So if you cannot be done with them for the sake of sustainability, I beg of you, oust them for the sake of style.

Smoking kills, yes. But vaping just sucks.

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