Smoking Ban: MPs Will Vote on Plan to Raise Smoking Age and Ban Vapes

MPS will vote today on new laws to phase out young people smoking it would mean that children aged 15 and under will never legally be able to buy tobacco and new powers are also being introduced to restrict Vapes they will restrict the flavors packaging and displays after a rise in the number of people children in particular taking up the habits which follows early data from the first major study on the long-term impact of vaping on blood vessels which found vaping does do damage and England's chief medical officer sir Chris witty joins us now morning good morning s Chris just on this issue of um vaping my father is a professor of Medical cellbiology in his 80s now he's been saying to me for years that we were getting it wrong on the advice about vaping of course smoking is bad but we were giving the impression that vaping was better and therefore okay to do you think that in retrospect Looking Back In The Last 5 Years we gave people the impression vaping was safe when in fact it's not well I think that you've said sort of two things that vaping is better and that vaping is okay those are two different things I think we are confident that vaping is safer than smoking but that is only because safe smoking is so extraordinarily dangerous I think you got to sort of just think through all the things that smoking does all the way through your life course from still births right at the beginning of your life asthma and children through heart disease stroke dementia lung cancer still our biggest cause of deaths multiple other cancers uh there are so many different things that smoking does so saying you're safer than smoking is really setting an incredibly low bar smoking is dangerous and it is also and this is the second key point on this highly addictive and the problem for people who are um uh smokers is that coming off smoking is incredibly difficult this is the reason why those who say all this is about Choice completely misunderstand smoking uh people who've become addicted to smoking in a young age find it incredibly difficult their choice has effectively been taken away if you're pro-choice you really should be strongly against addicting generally children and young people to something which will very possibly kill them or cause their lives to be miserable for uh years or indeed decades on the other hand Vapes uh are not things that I or anyone I I know who have called safe uh and my advice has been really clear which is if you uh smoke uh it is sensible to use vaping as a quit AG if that helps you but if you do not smoke do not vape and above all it is absolutely unacceptable to be marketing Vapes to Children which it is very clear many of the Vapes companies are and that's a tougher message than we were giving 5 years ago that your predecessors were saying I think if you look if you talk to my predecessor chief medical officers they would very much give exactly the same message and all the living chief medical officers from England Wales uh Scotland and Northern Ireland uh wrote a letter uh laying out exactly these points uh about three weeks ago that's so interesting so the message is very clear if you smoke Vape instead if you don't smoke don't Vape absolutely just don't Vape don't vape and and marketing to Children is utterly unacceptable well then that okay so uh local news agents you don't have to go to a specialized Vape Shop you just go into a local news agent and even though the cigarettes have that Now cover over them so you can't see the packaging there is on the counter of a local news agent absolutely tons of pink pale blue pastel colored Vapes for sale I mean they are they just look like sweetie and they are sold on the counter next to sweeties so what's going to happen with those debates so if so that that's one of um two things that uh the bill which is being voted on in Parliament today which I and I I think the overwhelming majority of doctors nurses and health professionals hope MPS will vote for uh is going to address um so on The Vape specifically uh as you say the way that um Vapes companies are marketing these to Children is through colors through flavors through us disposables cartoon characters placing them in particular ways that appeal to children and what this bill will do along with uh the Smoke free Generation Um is to uh make it make it possible for ministers substantially to restrict the numbers of colors and flavors and also have plain packaging uh and put them potentially behind the counter so that it's possible to uh make the attractiveness of Vapes much smaller than it is at the moment I just I the other problem with Vapes is that whereas if you smoke you might have a couple of cigarettes a day obviously some people chain smoke but vaping because there's really no restrictions on where you can Vape you can have a vape in your hand and in your mouth pretty much all the time that you're awake it must it actually must have such a damaging effect on you because you just do it constantly and this is why we really want to get back to what the Vapes were originally designed for which is simply as a quit Aid to help people who've got the incredibly dangerous addiction of smoking which is likely to uh kill them or or or injure them uh to move over to a safer but still not safe intervention uh rather than have them as a kind of just an accessory uh and sold as just as you say like sweets for children or uh something which is extremely trivial uh to adults these are not trivial products they are to help people stop smoking and that is really all they should be and just in terms of the medical evidence you are the chief medical officer what is the medical evidence on the damage that Vapes will do to you either a disposable one or I mean I honestly don't know the difference between a disposable or a non-disposable vape what is the evidence because whenever we do this story we get tons and tons and tons of par parents in particular glued to the scream because they feel like the message about vaping is harder to get across to their children than the message about smoking so what would you say to them so the reason that um we are confident that Vapes are safer than smoking other than the fact that smoking is so dangerous as they do have many fewer chemicals in them chemical toxins smoke smoking has got extraordinarily large number of carcinogens which things that cause cancer and other damaging products but Vapes are not themselves safe they have the majority of them have nicotine in them which is certainly addictive uh and may well have uh longer lasting effects on um developing uh brains earlier on in life in children um and we don't actually know the extent of the long-term effect of Vapes they have not been around for long enough to say at 30 years at 40 years at 50 years this is what happens if you Vaped continuously so I'm very strongly of the view that if people are moved from smoking to vaping which is a step very firmly in the right direction they should then try and move down to no vaping at all um but that's the key thing is to get off smoking for the smokers but for everybody else you really do not know what this is going to do to you in the long term but we know that multiple things if you inhale them compared to if you eat them uh can be extremely dangerous that's why in fact why air why air pollution is so dangerous is inhaling things there's very little barrier between the outside air and the the the blood uh and we do do not wish people who are not smokers to start vaping on health grounds can I ask you about the um the smoking bill in Parliament today this is very radical legislation going to essentially phase out the legal buying of cigarettes year by year so that today's 15 year olds will never legally buy a um a cigarette in the UK so it's a very radical move um and um you know I know that you strongly uh support this legislation um the last prime minister Liz truss called it an example of the nanny State her predecessor Boris Johnson said a couple of days ago it was absolutely nuts what is your message to list truss and Boris Johnson former Prime Ministers about this legislation well um with great respect to uh the former prime ministers and of course I've got great respect for uh Mr Johnson uh who I had the privilege of uh working for um those aren't arguments um those what we need to do is be really clear this is a very serious Public Health question um we know that large amounts of heart disease cancer stroke dementia uh and uh problems in pregnancy for example are caused by smoking we know that is based on addiction and therefore people's choices being taken away and calling things names whether it's Nan state or nuts doesn't matter isn't really a serious argument the other argument that Mr Johnson appeared to be advancing the only other argument as far as I could see he was advancing was that uh in a very different era uh the Great Hero S Winston Churchill smoked cigars um well I mean that was at a point when Health driven by very high smoking rates was very very much worse and I think we would all admire swinston but not wish to go back to 1940s and 1950s uh health um the other sort of argument against is that this was introduced in New Zealand um back in 2022 and then as soon as the government changed was overturned and the new prime minister Christopher luxen said that the reason that they'd overturned it was because they wanted to prevent a hidden tobacco market cropping up and stop shops from being targeted for crime look I suppose the thing is if you ban something then a black market emerges is that an argument that you've considered yeah it's an argument we've considered and the reason that we are confident it is a bad argument is that um every time there's uh the last time for example we had a significant um change in smoking legislation as you would expect demand for cigarettes went down and therefore the illegal Market went down so the evidence is when you have uh measures that reduce demand for cigarettes actually the legal Market contracts now the cigarette industry always puts this out as a scare story uh and um but there's no evidence uh to back it up and in this particular form of um legislation that's before Parliament today nobody who currently smokes is going to have any change to the law so there's no reason why people who are current smokers are desperately going to be a for um illegal cigarettes because they can carry on smoking and be sold cigarettes legally and will be able to continue to be sold cigarettes legally uh till the end of their days so I I don't think uh this argument really makes uh any practical sense and the evidence from previous examples is in fact the exact opposite happens by reducing demand you reduce uh the illegal market and it looks um as though the legislation will go through the House of Commons today can I ask you just one other question the covid inquiry you've given very important evidence to to that um rightly it's going to take a long time won't report for for years um but there could be another pandemic this year I mean we don't know you're the chief medical officer you'll be thinking about that all the time I've asked the last two Health secretaries Steve Barkley and now Victoria Atkins what's the one lesson they've learned which they would do differently for March 2020 and to be honest they didn't really have an answer to that but for you as chief medical officer what's the one thing you would absolutely do differently now to March 2020 if another pandemic broke well I think there's some sort of questions about what we' do if we reran the clock and I think I've said in the inquiry others have said we would probably have locked down uh slightly earlier not a huge amount earlier um there are a number of other changes we would have made uh on this one but I think it's really important that we don't uh assume that if we learn all the lessons from covid that'll make it possible for us to do the next pandemic uh in in a brilliant way because the last pandemic if you think about it that was really serious was HIV AIDS and that was a sexually transmitted infection largely affecting young adults 100% mortality when it's start a very different sort of disease what's common to them is the ability to scale up and I think one of the things that I always worry about is that in every country in every country this isn't a UK issue during the crisis people say never again this time we're going to invest in public health and then the crisis passes new emergencies arise and that enthusiasm for ensuring we we actually have the skills we have the capacity to scale up um are dissipated over time and that I suppose is the worry that's to me the biggest lesson is our Public Health capacity stronger than in March 2020 today uh it will be uh the question will be will it be stronger in five or 10 years and that is a political decision I really hope that it will be uh but the risk is that we're good at managing another covid crisis but we haven't uh invested in the capacity to scale up a we had a different sort of a crisis so right now it's not stronger than in 2020 I think right now it is stronger but My worry is uh that we could easily Fritter that away right um Professor Chris wiy thanks very much I just before you go the UK vaping industry Association says much more should be done to prevent youth access to vaping products they said we've long called for a licensing of retailers much more meaningful and stronger fins for those who sell Vapes to those under 18 and in the coming weeks we'll submit plan to government with detailed proposals for tighter regulation does that make you feel more reassured no I mean I think that if you look at I me The Vaping industry and I'm sure there are some uh very very responsible vaping companies whose only aim is to um help smokers to quit but um The Vaping industry saying it's all about enforcement look at the products that's the question look at the products look what's happening to vaping rates in children they have clearly been marketing to children whatever people may say Professor sis witty um good to talk to you this morning thank you very much thank you very much indeed thank you very much indeed uh right have you been smoking 20 a day your voice is really damaged is it I'm really sorry is it annoying no you don't need to apologize it happens to all of us I take time off work because I lost my voice I've had this I think it's going round I've had you know I had a kind of a flowy thing about a month ago I know and then the cough has persisted and it doesn't go away and it's in my in my throat no I have heard people describe it as the 100 day cough no there is no need to apologize it just does sound like you're a chain smoker but do you can you confirm or deny that you by I am not a chain smoker and I never are you a VAP no because my dad said to me as I said an expert in these things a medical subologist 10 years ago he said putting stuff from a vape into your lungs when we have no idea what it does there's no evidence and he was always worrying that better than smoking fine that gives the impression that it's okay it's not okay but no I don't smoke and I don't fake but I'm very sorry for my husky voice it's really annoying no I like the Husky voice I'm very sorry no need to your voice

Channel: Good Morning Britain

Views: 22,901

Keywords: good morning britain, breakfast show, news, morning news, gmb, good morning britain interview, itv, susanna reid, Talk Shows - Topic, vape ban, smoking ban, uk smoking ban, uk vaping ban, uk disposable vape ban, vaping, vaping in school, vaping side effects, vaping vs smoking, smoking, Chris Whitty, chris whitty, chris whitty interview

Id: vUMApWZOLxM

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024