Probe shows how easy it is to buy illegal vapes and cigarettes

"IF this street could talk," reads the facade of a disused unit in St Helen's Road.

- CONOR GOGARTY

The time we spent on the Swansea shopping street suggested the tale might not be a happy one.

Interspersed with the street's many fast food joints and barber's are six vape shops, all but one of which offered our undercover journalists illegal nicotine products. These ranged from disposable vapes - banned in June - to super-cheap packets of foreign cigarettes with no clear health warning.

When we asked one shopkeeper if he knew his products were against the law, he replied with a nonchalant half-smile: “Yeah. It’s no problem.”

Our first visit to St Helen’s Road came earlier this year when Peshawa Zada, the then-shopkeeper at Bob Marley Vapes, sold us a Chinese-made vape for £10.

This was before disposable vapes were banned across the UK, but even then its 10ml tank was five times bigger than the maximum. We also bought two counterfeit 20-packs of Benson & Hedges from him for £5 each. The shop was raided shortly afterwards by Swansea Council, which said 23-year-old Zada had been hiding thousands of black market cigarettes and vapes above a fluorescent light fitting. In July he was sentenced to a year and 10 months in jail.

Our purchases at the Bob Marley shop were part of an investigation in which we found seven shops in Cardiff, Swansea and Pontypridd offering illegal cigarettes or single-use vapes that breached the regulations at the time.

Now, two months into the ban on all disposable vapes, we have returned to St Helen’s Road and found other shopkeepers flagrantly breaking the law.

In Vape City, the sale of illicit vapes could hardly have been more blatant. Their staggeringly low price, £1, was felt-tipped across an A4 sheet to draw customers to shelves of colourfully-packaged disposables.

When we asked the shopkeeper if he knew they were banned, he said: “Yeah, I think so.”