E-cigarettes are fuelling an “alarming” new wave of nicotine addiction, with millions of children now hooked on vaping, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned this week.
IOL reports that in countries that have the data, children are on average nine times more likely than adults to vape, with the health agency’s caution coming on the heels of a warning that South Africa was seeing an alarming increase in a vaping-cannabis combination by youngsters.
The WHO report said the industry was promoting vapes as supposedly less harmful products than cigarettes, but in fact was aggressively targeting young people and getting children addicted.
According to its first global estimate of e-cigarette use, more than 100m people are vaping – including at least 86m adults, mostly in high-income countries, and at least 15m children aged 13 to 15.
“E-cigarettes are fuelling a new wave of nicotine addiction,” said Etienne Krug, WHO director of health determinants, promotion and prevention.
“They are marketed as harm reduction but, in reality, are hooking kids on nicotine earlier and risk undermining decades of progress.”"
One in five still addicted to tobacco
Globally, people are smoking less, with the number of tobacco users dropping from 1.38bn in 2000 to 1.2bn in 2024, while the world’s population has swelled.
However, one in five adults worldwide are still addicted to tobacco.
“Millions of people are stopping, or not taking up, tobacco use, thanks to tobacco control efforts,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, but to counter this, the tobacco industry “is fighting back with new nicotine products, aggressively targeting young people”.
Twelve countries had seen tobacco use rising, the WHO said in its global report on trends in tobacco use prevalence.
‘Subtle’ online ads
WHO’s Assistant Director-General Jeremy Farrar said tobacco use was killing more than 7m people every year, while second-hand smoke killed more than 1m.
In some countries, children were under 10 when they started using tobacco, said Alison Commar, the global report’s lead author, who warned that youngsters were being “very heavily exposed” to tobacco advertising online.
“It’s really subtle. It’s very difficult to regulate,” she said, with social media influencers using products while discussing something else.
SA’s own vaping-cannabis storm
Meanwhile, in South Africa, the delay in passing the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill is exposing our youth to avoidable harm that will be hard to deal with later, warn local experts.
Professor Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, chairperson and head of the School of Health Systems and Public Health at the University of Pretoria, told IOL it was critical that awareness be raised on the rapidly growing crisis of vaping among young people.
The professor, who delivered a lecture on Youth Vaping and Cannabis Co-use: Policy Failure or Mental Health Crisis? this week, said it was crucial to correct the “common misconceptions and misinformation, for example, the belief that vaping is harmless, or that cannabis is ‘natural’ and therefore safe, especially for adolescents”.
The university, he added, wanted to educate the public on the fast-growing crisis and highlight new data showing that many young people are not only using these two products exclusively but are using them together. This, he warned, may increase risks associated with either product.
He said the worrying vaping-cannabis trend might be related to how people are dealing with growing poor mental health issues.
This “silent storm”, he suggested, could be an unintended consequence of recent policy shifts, like the Cannabis for Private Use Act of 2024 and the delayed regulation of e-cigarettes.
Criticising the delays in regulation, he added that this was not just a health issue, it was also a governance issue. “The longer we delay, the harder it becomes to reverse these trends.”
Policy confusion
On recent reports that KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi has started a campaign to educate police on the Cannabis for Private Use Act, and whether other provinces should follow suit, he said: “Absolutely. The initiative is commendable and should be urgently replicated in other provinces.
“There is widespread confusion among law enforcement, communities, and even schools, colleges and university campuses about what this Act allows and what it does not. Without clarity, youth are likely to misinterpret the law as a green light for use, even though the Act does not legalise cannabis use by minors or allow open public consumption.”
Bill ‘undermines democracy’
However, on the call for urgent stricter regulation of vaping, cannabis and related products, the Free Market Foundation has warned that the Tobacco Bill “undermines democratic processes”.
The foundation’s Nicholas Woode-Smith believes the Bill’s provisions “include sweeping restrictions, punitive penalties, and unchecked ministerial authority, and risk eroding both constitutional safeguards and the role of public participation”.
His talk aimed to discuss the Bill’s disregard for harm reduction, its neglect of economic and social consequences, and its failure to address the illicit tobacco market.
“More than a health policy, the Tobacco Bill represents a serious challenge to democratic accountability and legislative integrity,” the Foundation said in a statement.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Vaping peaks in South African high schools – UCT study
What proposed Tobacco Bill means for vaping in South Africa
Vaping scourge among children prompts long-term health effects study
Parent, sibling attitudes among top influences on teenage vaping