Vaping Products: Usage by Children

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, the House should be really grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for introducing this debate. There are a few matters that I would perhaps want to wrestle with him about on this.

First, smoking vapes has been going on for a lot longer than the noble Lord said. In fact, the first vapes that I came across were invented by Herbert Gilbert, a scrap metal dealer in Pennsylvania who had nothing better to do but smoke cigarettes—he smoked two packets a day. Eventually he devised a very similar machine to the one that we have now, which was battery driven—it has been around a very long time. However, it did not take off—he took out a patent but it did not work—and since then there have been several attempts from various companies. It is only recently that there has been this sudden massive surge in interest in vapes. Of course, that includes what is really important and what I think the noble Lord forgot to mention: the need for research into what is happening.

There are many serious unknowns in the things which people say are proven about vapes. I do not want to argue the toss entirely, but certainly one problem we have straightaway is that most of the studies in the literature—by the way, hundreds of studies can be seen which are recorded; for example, in the National Institutes of Health database—show that in fact, many studies have been funded by the tobacco companies.

The effects of vaping are still unknown. The amount of nicotine in a vape is about 1/20th of what it is in a cigarette, and a whole pack contains perhaps up to 200 milligrams of nicotine, while a vape contains probably something like 1/10th of that. However, one of the problems is that none of the researchers have really measured the number of puffs a day, nor the number of vapes which are taken, so some basic quantification is needed.

No clear health effects have been recorded in the literature. There are many suppositions about laryngitis and cancer—one of the very first things reported in the 1960s but which was probably from smoking cigarettes. There is no measure of dose, no numbers of puffs and so on, and such basic data are needed.

There is no question that there is possible serious damage from vapes, but it is not certain. For example, there is some evidence of possible cellular damage in the lungs and trachea, but nobody has found what one hoped to find—or, rather, did not want to find—which is carcinogenic effects. There have been no cancers in any research that I can find. There is no DNA damage, which is interesting, because cigarettes definitely cause DNA damage. There are psychotoxic effects. Cytokines such as interleukins and inflammatory products are occasionally produced, but this will happen, for example, during a heavy cold, and they do not lead to long-term effects. There is a problem with that.

Heat may be an issue with hot vapour. One problem now is that heat-not-burn cigarettes are available; they are used for marijuana, because it needs a much higher temperature to vaporise than does tobacco. You can heat tobacco just sufficient to get the nicotine but with marijuana you have to heat it much more. That may be much more dangerous, and certainly must be looked into.

Overall, it is clear from spectroscopy that has been done that there are at least 80 different compounds in the vapour of different vapes and they are not standardised. I argue that this is something that we need to think about. Clearly, there is no regulation of vapes and no regulation of what they contain. That is what we should argue for initially, until we understand it better. It is true that this has attracted American attention. President Trump was the president responsible for banning vapes for kids, which is interesting. We need to do that.

I end on a nice bit of good news. Vapes do not seem to harm fertility. I am pleased to tell you that studies by doctors in Germany have shown that neither fertilisation nor embryo growth are affected by this. This is important too, because women worry deeply about smoking in pregnancy. I am not going to say whether it is a good or bad thing in pregnancy; that is not the point. I want to emphasise that the research is not adequate at the moment to make very clear judgments about vaping.