If you can’t beat them, join them, so the old adage goes.
And that’s exactly what Hussain Ahmed has done.
The Dundee business owner rightly came under fire yesterday as he opened his new Murraygate shop Home Choice with a “horrific” incentive – free Crystal Bar vapes to the first 100 customers who spend £10 or more in store.
It’s obviously a ridiculous, tone-deaf, utterly irresponsible promotion. Both in terms of the environmental impact and the message that it sends: that vapes are harmless.
Because they aren’t.
Nicotine makes them addictive. Lithium batteries make them potentially explosive. And as has been well documented by this columnist, their awful smell and appearance make users look like overgrown, dummy-sooking toddlers.
As for Mr Ahmed, the fact that he’s made this offer just as the Scottish Government is due to give its verdict on a proposed ban on disposable vapes is so blatantly ill-timed you could almost mistake it for satire.
But it isn’t.
He’s not trying to make a point, as far as I can tell.
Ultimately, he is a business owner trying to get his shop off the ground on a struggling city centre street.
And his observation that “we think 70-80% of our customers are using them… so why not?” is fair enough (if factually airy) logic.
It’s supply and demand that makes the high street world go round after all.
To my mind, he is not creating a problem, but exploiting and propagating the disgraceful prevalence of disposable vape use which already exists in our city.
Dundee is ripe for free vape deal
The fact that a piece of kit devised allegedly to help people stop smoking has become the equivalent of a toy in a box of Rice Krispies is a damning indictment not of the business in question but of the vaping epidemic sweeping Dundee.
It’s clear to see, the evidence is literally littering our city.
In January, environmental campaigner Laura Young picked up 55 discarded disposable vapes in just one hour walking the streets. That’s almost one per minute.
And just last week The Courier spoke to three teenage school pupils who ‘couldn’t live without’ their e-cigarettes.
The Morgan Academy pupils talked openly about how their school hallways are constantly “smoky” from the flavoured vapours.
So clearly, the age “restrictions” on the purchase of disposable vapes aren’t working in our city.
Vape pens aren’t teenage contraband anymore – they’re standard accessories for the average adolescent.
And it’s not just teenagers who are being subjected to second-hand “smoke” they didn’t ask for.
Bad habits die hard
Just last weekend, at an indoor gig which clearly stated “no smoking or vaping inside this building”, there were people openly pluming all throughout the tightly-packed crowd.
There seems to be a widespread wilful ignorance about the harm these devices can do, all hanging on the party line of ‘they’re much better for you than cigarettes’.
Of course they are. But for people with asthma, or any kind of respiratory sensitivities, these vapours are still harmful and irritating.
So one of two things is happening here.
The first possibility is that the people using vapes are simply arrogant enough that they’ve decided their comfort should be prioritised above the health of those around them.
But the second – more likely – scenario is that the addictive qualities of the vapes have got people so hooked that many users cannot go more than five or 10 minutes without a pull.
It’s not malice, it’s just habit.
And it’s much easier to criticise one shrewd shopkeeper than it is to break the habit of a whole city.
