"Within months, I was buying a new one every three days – I wouldn’t leave the house without one," says Eleanor Morgan. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION
My vaping habit was seeded on an autumn afternoon in 2021. I was cooking roast chicken in a friend’s kitchen, where her partner was taking long drags from a tiny device. Plumes of vapour streamed from his nose like a cartoon dragon. It smelt like old sweets; nostalgic, oddly reassuring.
He was using a Juul. I was used to seeing those enormous vapes that look like school recorders. I had a couple of puffs on this elegant little thing and spluttered like a teenager trying to inhale for the first time. But the berry-flavoured nicotine “hit” on my throat was pleasing. I wanted more.
I’ve never smoked properly. To be clear, I have smoked, but I’ve very rarely bought cigarettes or smoked on my own. I was a social smoker for a long time; throughout university, in my 20s and some way into my 30s. I’m not a drinker, so can’t claim booze as a gateway to nicotine. I just found smoking with other people delicious.
I’ve done a fine job of “forgetting” that I’m asthmatic along the way. Waking up with a thick wheeze would put me off for months. Then I’d be tempted again. This stopped in 2020, after I got Covid. I was really sick, and the memory is like a fever dream. Thankfully, I escaped any inpatient treatment, but sat in A&E on a nebuliser twice. My lungs were painful and tight for months. Doctors told me I had Long Covid. As the months rolled on, smoking completely left my frame of reference.
By that autumn afternoon, I was much better; in the depths of training as a psychotherapist and feeling healthy enough. I hadn’t smoked at all. But I liked the Juul so much that I bought my own the next day, joining the 4.7 million people in Great Britain now regularly vaping. In the beginning, I only vaped three to four times a day, as a “treat”. God, did that change.
The Juul cartridges were expensive, so I made them last days. As my compulsion to vape grew, the cost became silly. So, in late 2022, I switched to the cheaper, disposable ElfBars. I was initially bewildered by the flavours. The first time I said, “Can I have a Blue Razz, please?”, the words felt like pebbles in my nearly 40-year-old mouth: hard to say, hard to swallow.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I was buying an ElfBar every three days. I wouldn’t leave the house without one. I watched television with one laid across my thigh. Increasingly, I was aware of something I’d heard other vapers share, with a sting of remorse in their voice: it felt like a dummy.
My dependence had, of course, become physical and psychological. As a psychotherapist, I was more interested in the latter, until my partner told me that I sounded like a wheezing old accordion at night. “You need to cop on to yourself,” she said, lovingly but firmly. An Irish accent magically helps a message land.
I started thinking about the psychological term “transitional objects”: the material objects that children invest primal significance in as they begin separating from their primary caregiver. Teddies, blankets, dummies and so on, are sucked, stroked and played with, often becoming essential for falling asleep. Adults can have transitional objects, too: clothing or photographs carried between house moves or workplaces, for example. Transitional objects can be functional or dysfunctional. For me, the cycles of craving and self-flagellation were dysfunctional. Last week, I threw my dummy away.
Going cold turkey hasn’t been quite the cliff-jump I expected. I read that the most intense cravings can happen two to three days in, when the nicotine leaves your system. This was true. From day three, I was imagining the hit several times a day, feeling irritable and yearning for a blast of berry mist as the antidote, feeling physically restless. But it’s manageable.
I’m able to “observe” the thoughts and cravings and not act. It’s possible my training may help. My chest already feels better and I’m using my inhaler less at night. Apparently, I’m not wheezing like an antique instrument quite so much. But I remain struck by how hooked I became, and how quickly.
“While a helpful aid for smokers to quit, if you don’t smoke, choosing to put anything in your lungs that isn’t clean, fresh air is ill-advised,” says Professor John Hurst, a professor of respiratory medicine at University College London. I wasn’t trying to quit smoking. I simply advised myself to choose putting mixed-berry nicotine vapour in my lungs.
In 2012, 700,000 people were vaping. The surge in popularity, like vaping itself, is relatively new.
This means there are no data about long-term damage. “But if someone starts in childhood and continues to vape for 10 years or more, they’re likely to have some kind of lung harm,” says Professor Nick Hopkinson, a professor of respiratory medicine at Imperial College London. He stresses that vaping is “much safer” than cigarettes and their “amazingly toxic smoke”, because tar and carbon monoxide are “either not there at all, or at much lower doses”.
“Even though we can’t say what will happen to someone who vapes for 50 years, we know enough about toxicology to be confident about the risk,” he continues. Nicotine is always risky. “When you look at measures of inflammation and scarring in the lungs, the evidence is that the same processes you see with smoking are also happening with vaping, just to a lesser extent.”
If, like me, you have asthma, vaping really isn’t smart. “It is going to aggravate asthma,” says Hopkinson. “And asthma is one of the strongest predictors of getting long-term lung disease, like COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease].” These are links in a chain I don’t want to make.
Only 1.1 per cent of never-smokers are current vapers. I was a sporadic smoker. But my physical dependence on vaping is less puzzling than the mental aspect. I vaped most often in front of the TV or my laptop, and while reading. In a habitual situation, we often crave the missing parts of that situation if they’re not there. For me, that became a vape. I “needed” it in certain places to feel complete.
There are the emotional drivers, too. I would often collapse on the sofa, feeling overwhelmed by a work situation, and crave my vape like others may crave a drink. Ironically, research actually shows that nicotine can worsen anxiety. But habits can plough deep furrows in a psyche.
That so many people have become hooked on vaping warrants some deeper societal questioning. But there are also immediate issues to address.
Five million disposable vapes being discarded every week in the UK poses a serious environmental risk. Then there’s how popular vaping has become among children. The number of children experimenting has grown 50 per cent year-on-year. The most popular brand is ElfBar, with its fruity flavours and bright packaging.
Many have called for an outright ban on disposable vapes, but Hopkinson isn’t convinced: “Evidence from the US suggests that banning these flavours actually increases youth smoking.” He believes an excise tax of £5 will make disposable vapes less affordable (“taking them out of pocket-money territory”) and accessible. Plus, HMRC and Border Force will have more power in stopping disposables flooding into the UK.
“This is a fiscal measure that could be done very quickly. We asked Jeremy Hunt to put it in his budget in March,” says Hopkinson. “So it’s galling when the Prime Minister says, ‘This is a terrible problem, we need to do something about it’.”
Unfortunately, for many who become die-hard vapers, it’s easy to become selectively attentive to the bigger implications. Maybe a price increase would decrease vaping rates across the board, like raising the price of tobacco did with smoking. Selfishly, I hope so, because the prospect of spending £12 on a Blue Razz if I ever cave is too much to bear.
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