Dear fellow 20-somethings, you do not look cool vaping, you look like a tool

You certainly would have noticed the epidemic we are facing in this city. It’s not vandalism or stupidly expensive iced coffees – although I do feel we need to address this, as the other day I paid $7.

No, this crisis is significantly crapper than those two things combined. I’m talking about vaping, or the use of e-cigarettes, as they are referred to by political figures and those over the age of 50. Everywhere you look these days, you’ll find people – commonly Millennials and Gen Zs – sucking on these grim little boxes and exhaling smoke that smells like a Chupa Chup.

Some vapers seem to suffer under the delusion they look cool. In fact, they look like tools.Credit: Getty

If you want to look at it from a scientific perspective – of which I have no background – things could best be described as “not great”. Recent studies show some single-use vapes can contain the equivalent amount of nicotine as hundreds of cigarettes. I am also no mathematician, but that’s a lot of cigarettes to go through in a week, which is about the same amount of time a single-use vape lasts in the hands of the average vaper. Surely not even Don Draper himself was chowing down that much nicotine on a regular basis.

My real issue with vaping though, is that from a visual perspective, it just looks incredibly, deplorably wretched. I do not care how attractive you are, or how cool your clothes are, if you’re vaping you’re just humiliating yourself.

Last week, while walking through Carlton Gardens, I saw a woman pause her exercising, walk a few metres, reach into her shoulder bag, take a hit of her vape, then return to her exercise spot. It was a horrible sight, not so much for the health reasons behind it, but rather because she felt the need to feed her addiction at that moment. She grabbed at the vape as if they were in the grips of a secret affair. As if the vape were a cheating boyfriend she just kept going back to.

A week or so earlier, I was on the 86 tram when a young guy hopped on at the Melbourne Museum and exited at Parliament Station. In the span of those two stops, he hit his vape six times and looked like the Cowardly Lion while doing it.

Yes, people who vape are simply nicotine addicts, nothing more, nothing less. But at least these two people appeared to feel the requisite shame of their addiction, unlike those who are deluding themselves that they look cool. Here’s a message to the hipster cafe inhalers and beer garden puffers: if you’re going to suck down battery acid that could potentially ruin you and all your future generations, don’t pretend to yourself that you’re doing something sophisticated. You’re dining out on toxic lolly mist. (If you’re an older smoker and vapes are keeping you off the dirty darts, fair enough, but you still don’t look cool.)

It’s this delusion of hipness that makes me concerned about the federal government’s ban on the importation of disposable vapes, which started on January 1, and will be extended to all other non-prescription vapes next week. Firstly, just about anyone can still get a disposable vape from just about any shopping strip, and secondly, you know that banning something makes it seem cooler to young people, right? I suggest we leave the vapers to their legal indignity, and let the rest of us cringe on their behalf.

Roby D’Ottavi is a writer and director based in Melbourne.

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