Reply to Dr Mercola on Vaping

I don’t vape. I don’t smoke. I don’t use any chemical stimulants or sedatives. My body, if I may be forgiven the statement of fact, is a product of the kind of self-control that the average boy in my class wouldn’t recognise if you printed the definition on his forehead. I will not ruin that with nicotine or whatever else the current fashionable cloud-flavour happens to be. But that is my choice. It is not, and must not be, the State’s.

Dr Mercola’s recent article makes the case that vaping is more dangerous than people think, that it’s tied to COPD, that even ex-vapers are at greater risk than those who never touched the stuff. All of this may be true. In fact, let’s say it is true. Let’s go further—let’s say vaping is every bit as harmful as smoking, and possibly worse. It still doesn’t follow that a single adult anywhere in the world should be told what he may inhale.

People have the right to do what they like with their own bodies. That includes smoking, vaping, mainlining heroin, or going teetotal and living off carrot juice. You do not acquire the right to run another man’s life just because you have a medical study to wave about. If you believe that health risk is an automatic trigger for State intervention, you have just signed up to a society where the government dictates your every meal, your every movement, and your every pastime. I don’t want anyone telling me what to eat or drink, and I will extend that courtesy to others.

Even so, vaping is clearly a safer alternative for people who already rely on nicotine. The numbers on smoking-related disease are persuasive; if vaping halves the odds, it’s a net gain. It may not be safe, but it doesn’t have to be. Harm reduction is not perfection, and in the real world, “less bad” is worth something. For the smoker who can’t or won’t quit nicotine, moving to a vape is an upgrade.

And yet, there’s a point here where I am entirely in favour of Dr Mercola’s doomsaying—not for the reason he intends, but because of the company I’m forced to keep. Most of the boys in my class—fat, smelly, and decorated with bright constellations of pustules—spend their breaks in the toilets, shrouded in clouds of artificial mango. If the dire predictions about COPD are right, their lungs will be sludge by the time they’re thirty. This, I submit, is an excellent thing. The sooner the weakest of the herd cough themselves into early graves, the sooner England’s collective IQ and air quality will improve.

Before anyone howls about cruelty, consider this: these are not the nation’s future engineers or surgeons. They are the dysgenic refuse of a country that long ago stopped believing in self-discipline. They stagger from chip shop to vaping stall and back again, heads full of BBC talking points, bodies already collapsing under the weight of their own neglect. If they want to spend their pocket money accelerating the process, I am not going to stop them.

So yes—let the Mercola warnings stand unchallenged. Let there be full public knowledge that vaping may scar lungs and turn breathing into an extreme sport. But do not, under any circumstances, give the government an excuse to use the power to stop adults doing it. That power, once granted, will be used on you next—your caffeine, your whisky, your steak tartare, your quiet evening with a cigar.

My position is simple: I will never touch a vape. If you want to, that’s your problem. And if the side effects trim down the clouds of flavoured fog—and the overfed halfwits producing it—so much the better for the rest of us.