Paddy's fear & loathing - 'WE'RE AN EXPERIMĚNT'

The TV journo reveals the biggest regret of his life

- Fleur Guthrie

Paddy Gower wishes his mother Joan could have vaped. It might have been the tool that saved her from a lifelong smoking addiction, which ultimately killed the 57-year-old medical receptionist.

“She smoked a pack of cigarettes a day since she was a teenager and tried everything to give up – hypnotism, nicotine patches, and my dad, sister and me all asking her to stop. She just couldn’t,” shares the popular broadcaster.

“Then Mum did the weirdest thing – she gave up smoking when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2006. She had a best friend who lived around the corner that she used to smoke with and after Mum died, I asked the friend, ‘Did Mum ever sneak around here for a ciggie in the last few months?’ Her friend said ‘no’.

“It’s such a strange addiction and for someone like my mum, vaping would have been a godsend. We could’ve tried to get her on to that and in all likelihood it would’ve been a better alternative for her than smoking.”

However, as the star points out in his new TV documentary, Patrick Gower: On Vaping, the introduction of vaping has now caused a new generation of kids, who have never previously smoked cigarettes before, to become addicted to nicotine.

The difference between smoking and vaping is that smoking delivers nicotine by burning tobacco and vaping can deliver nicotine by heating a liquid in a less harmful way.

A 2022 survey by Action for Smokefree (ASH) estimated that more than 250,000 Kiwis vape.