The last few years have seen an increase in E cigarettes and therefore an increase into the role they play in helping people quit smoking tobacco. Whilst vapes contain nicotine, they do not contain tobacco and have therefore become a widely accepted smoking alternative, regarded as curbing the addiction process. Late in July this year, a paper was published by the medical journal BMJ into the statistics of smokers and non-smokers and their relationship with vaping. Regardless of your individual countries take and stance on the effects of e-cigs, the studies numbers speak louder than words.
How the study worked
The BMJ or the British Medical Journal is an international peer reviewed medical journal in which daily articles, podcasts and blogs are posted concerning research into medical practices and research. With an international following and as a go to for the best in medical innovations, the BMJ is certainly a source to take seriously. Their study into smoking cessation used survey data from over 160,000 people and spanned just under 15 years. The main objective was to examine whether the increase in the use of electronic cigarettes correlated with how many people were quitting smoking tobacco which will hopefully lead to a definitive answer to the positive effects of vaping over smoking. Using the US Current Population Survey – Tobacco Use Supplement from the years of 2001 to 2015, the group managed to compile a shed load of data which could be referred back to in future cases on the issue. The survey used participants who had claimed to have smoked cigarettes regularly in the past 12 months before the survey took place, each year (2014-2015 or 2013-2014 and so on) were compared with each other to see if there was a rise or fall in tobacco smoking in the vaping age.
Numbers regarding cigarette quitting
The numbers that came back from the survey showed a massive correlation between smoking cessation and vaping. As an example, let’s take the 2014 to 2015 year of subjects. The 2014-2015 yearly survey had 161 054 of the subjects being current smokers and 2136 were recent quitters. Of these numbers, 38.2% of the current smokers and 49.3% of recent quitters had tried e-cigarettes and 11.5% and 19% of them were current vapers, at least using them every day or some days. E-cigarette users it seemed, were more likely than non-users to give up the tobacco habit completely. It also seems that as the years have gone on, the yearly cessation rate has increased, not only for the year before but for all other years before that. The numbers also showed that as of 2014-2015, there was an increase in percentage of how likely subjects were to succeed in quitting altogether.
What this means
In short this can mean only good things for the future of vaping and people’s attitudes towards it. People seem far more likely to give up smoking altogether if they vape, meaning less suspicion and far more advocacy of it. There are now more proven numbers which vaping companies can use to promote their products as opposed to mere speculation beforehand.
Despite these positives, it’s still worth keeping in mind that many countries see vaping as not a way to curb smoking but more to get non-smokers hooked on nicotine. There is still a way to go before studies show that this is not the case and of course this data is truly subjective. Many non-smokers may use vaping as a hobby and often do so without the nicotine content of the e- cig Liquids, keeping it as a fun hobby without adding nicotine to their vapes.