HUGH Mulvihill’s letter (September 8) arguing in opposition to the banning of single-use vapes misses some essential factors about this new pattern. For a begin, the UK Authorities doesn’t settle for that nicotine, the highly-addictive stimulant drug in these vapes, is a drug of misuse. Smoking and alcohol are the area of health ministers; medication aren’t. Medication are lined by justice ministers, as a prison matter.

The second problem about this vaping drawback is that 1.3 million of those vapes are dumped each week within the UK. They’re manufactured from hard-to-recycle plastic and have batteries that explode and trigger fires in houses and recycling centres.

It’s to forestall nicotine dependancy in younger teenagers, and the related air pollution drawback, that I and lots of others are campaigning to, ban these vapes. For hundreds of years Huge Tobacco has efficiently addicted billions of individuals to nicotine, in cigarettes, sadly inflicting the early deaths of fifty% of people who smoke. It’s true that nicotine itself just isn’t the reason for these premature deaths, it’s the 7,000 different chemical substances, flavours and unknown substances which were added to cigarettes to draw as large a piece of the inhabitants to smoke that has precipitated the deadly cancers, lung and coronary heart issues.

Many years of cautious work has decreased youngster smoking in Scotland right down to below 7% however the brand new vaping pattern has now bought greater than 11.6% of younger teenagers hooked on nicotine, and one in three of those disposable vape customers are changing to smoking cigarettes.

Disposable single-use vaping, like smoking, has zero well being advantages. These vapes are loaded with child-friendly flavours and unknown chemical substances. Younger teenagers don’t want this type of vaping to stop their nicotine dependancy issues. No physician or well being skilled would prescribe this as an answer. Vaping is presently regulated by our smoking legal guidelines, that are utterly ineffective, as a result of they permit anybody to promote disposable single-use vapes.

Banning disposable vapes could be finished by the Scottish Parliament. It’ll price not one penny of public funds to cease this new drug misuse pattern. Such a ban would additionally instantly stop the vape-dumping environmental drawback.

The drug barons have been utilizing youngsters as drug mules. The vaping trade is doing precisely the identical, through the use of youngsters as nicotine mules to extend their market. The UK Vaping Trade Affiliation is panicking that the benefiting from disposable vapes shall be misplaced, so it’s attempting to scare us into believing {that a} full ban will solely improve the unlawful vaping merchandise being bought to teenagers. We must nip this new drug dependancy pattern within the bud, in a short time, as a result of an entire ban will assist dad and mom and youths to know that they’re all being conned into believing that that is safer than smoking.

Max Cruickshank, Glasgow.

Assisted Dying Invoice should go

MICHAEL Matheson and Humza Yousaf apparently oppose a wise law on assisted dying (“Matheson opposed to assisted dying law”, The Herald, September 7). These younger males have evidently not skilled the lack of a beloved member of the family who was mentally competent, understanding dying was inevitable, with a physique wracked with most cancers, enduring ache that no medicine might relieve. Within the case I discuss with, Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Invoice, if correctly constituted, might have saved as much as eight weeks of struggling.

I’m a retired farmer. If I had precipitated any of my dying or diseased animals agony like that I’d have been, appropriately, prosecuted. Why ought to people need to undergo long-term while animals are higher cared for?

It has been broadly said that between 70% and 80% of Scots want a correctly constituted assisted dying legislation to be accessible to the poor Scots who can not afford to travel to a different wise nation to finish their struggling. Many main nations have made provision for this objective. In Oregon, USA, it has been authorized for terminally in poor health, mentally competent adults to have an assisted dying since 1997, with not one of the predicted dire penalties.

Gordon Caskie, Campbeltown.

Older Scots have a lot to thole

WE learn that greater than two-thirds of older Scots think about that they aren’t appreciated by society (“Older Scots don’t feel valued”, The Herald, September 4). It’s not tough, I imagine, to know why such a notion ought to exist. The older era has been confronted with profound adjustments and developments in society. Allow us to think about a few of them: There may be being seen by many companies and organisations as some sort of non-person when one lives with out an e-mail handle; the widespread closure of many financial institution branches resulting in problem for a lot of with regard to having face-to-face conferences with workers and at occasions having issues with handy entry to money; the deliberate adjustments to landline phone amenities, essential for a lot of aged individuals, come 2025; the objections being expressed to the triple lock on state pension provision; the stress to do purposes on-line, comparable to passports, driving licences and revenue tax returns; in the course of the pandemic the discharge of sufferers from hospital to enter care houses with out checks for Covid; delays in accessing medical consideration and being made to really feel like some sort of second-class citizen when not having a wise phone.

There might be different cases which some would want to see added. In fact, it has not all been draw back for the older members of our society right now. Most of them, for instance, not like their dad and mom and grandparents, haven’t been confronted with the calls for and sacrifices of world wars. One senses at occasions that there are these in society who look to the day when the present era of these recognised because the aged have handed on and life could be change into much more streamlined with rather a lot fewer complaints concerning the nature and tempo of change.

Meantime, I and others among the many “older” can collect some consolation from the statement made by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “the best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”

Ian W Thomson, Lenzie.

Nettle guru

REGARDING the dialogue on nettles (“We want critical insurance policies for the challenges we face”, The Herald, September 4, and Letters, September 8), I keep in mind being taught this jingle in school a few years in the past: “Gently touch a stinging nettle. and it hurts you for your pains.

“Contact it like a person of mettle, and it comfortable as silk stays.”

Gordon W Smith, Paisley.