‘Beside himself with craving’: the teenagers hooked on vaping
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One mother says son loved mountain biking but a year later ‘he’s not interested – he runs out of breath’.
By Clea Skopeliti
When Sarah caught her 13-year-old son vaping in his room last year, he tried a classic teenage line on her. ‘He said: “It’s not mine, it’s my friend’s,”’ remembers the teacher from West Yorkshire. ‘I said: “Yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.”’
Liam*, now 14, first tried vaping with two friends after one of them sneaked a parent’s vape. ‘They’d been watching videos on TikTok showing tricks you can do,’ says Sarah. ‘I think they thought it was cool.’
Between 2021 and 2022, the proportion of 11- to 17-year-olds in Britain who vape rose from 3.3% to 7%, according to Action on Smoking and Health (Ash). The proportion of those who had tried vaping increased from 11.2% to 15.8%.
A year on, Sarah describes her son as ‘completely addicted’. When she first caught him vaping, she ‘dropped down on him really hard’. ‘We grounded him and took everything off him,’ s...
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