Caution - spin doctors at work
Wednesday, August 14, 2024 at 10:15 According to analysis by ASH, based on research conducted by YouGov, ‘nearly three million people in Britain have quit smoking with a vape in the last five years’.
Can this be true? Experience has taught me to be extremely wary of any ‘analysis’ conducted by ASH and I’m not going to change now.
This after all is the organisation that in July 2020, just five months after the outbreak of Covid, declared that ‘A million people have stopped smoking since the Covid pandemic hit Britain’.
It wasn’t true but it made a good headline.
So call me old fashioned but I prefer to stick with the figures published each year by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) whose annual reports concerning adult smoking (and vaping) habits in the UK present a rather different picture (albeit we are still waiting for the 2023 figures which should be published next month).
According to the ONS, the number of adult smokers in the UK dropped from 7.4m (15.1%) in 2017 to 6.4m (12.9%) in 2022 (the last figures that are available).
In that five year period the number of smokers therefore fell by one million. According to ASH, however, the number of adults who quit smoking in the five years since 2019 (thanks to vaping alone) was nearly THREE million.
Even allowing for ‘new’ smokers (ie adults who started smoking during that period), it’s still a stretch to declare that three million smokers have quit after switching to vaping in the last five years.
In any case, if you accept ASH’s analysis, the number of smokers who have stopped smoking in the last five years should be considerably more than three million because what about the many smokers who have quit via other means (cold turkey, for example, which to the best of my knowledge is still the number one method of giving up).
Meanwhile, according to ASH, an estimated eleven per cent of the adult population in Britain now vape, the equivalent of 5.6 million people and the highest rate ever.
That’s a significant increase on the ONS figure for 2022 (4.5 million) which was based on the annual Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).
I’m not saying the YouGov/ASH figure is wrong (it’s based on a survey), but it’s important to stress that a significant number of vapers are dual users who smoke and vape.
In fact, according to ASH, 2.7 million (53%) of the 5.6m are former smokers, which means that 2.9m vapers are still smoking.
But wait. If ‘nearly three million people in Britain have quit smoking with a vape in the last five years’, and there are currently three million former smokers who vape in the UK, what about the smokers who quit and switched to vaping before that?
I’m guessing that many have subsequently quit vaping as well because - if I have read this correctly - the average period people vape after quitting smoking is two years, which is bad news for the vaping industry because it demonstrates the finite nature of vaping and the limited lifespan of e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation tool.
In truth, though, it’s not my experience because most of the vapers I know have been vaping for the best part of a decade and have no plans to quit because yes, they may be addicted to nicotine, but they enjoy it. (Sound familiar?)
As I say, I would caution against quoting any ASH analysis as fact because in my experience it’s usually based on estimates and calculations, added to which there is often a significant degree of spin behind their interpretation of the data.
In this instance I suspect that the aim is to normalise vapes as the number one quit smoking tool until such time as ex-smoking vapers substantially outnumber smokers.
After that vaping will be public health enemy number one, leapfrogging smoking, alcohol, and ultra-processed food.
Undeterred by (and possibly oblivious to) such thoughts, the UK Vaping Industry Association tweeted:
New data from @AshOrgUK found more than half of ex-smokers in Great Britain who quit in the past five years - amounting to 2.7 million adults - used a vape in their last quit attempt.
Further, it revealed the main motivations for vaping amongst current smokers included to cut down on smoking, protect others from the risk of second-hand smoke [my emphasis] or to help them quit.
Alarmingly, the leading public health charity [my emphasis] also reported that misperceptions around vaping are at an all time high, with 50% of smokers wrongly believing vaping to be as or more harmful when compared with smoking.
The funny thing is, the same organisation described by the UKVIA as a ‘leading public health charity’ continues to demand more and more restrictions on the sale and packaging of e-cigarettes, which is surely partly to blame for many smokers ‘wrongly believing’ that vaping is just as harmful as smoking.
Reap what you sow, and all that, but I genuinely don’t see how being a lickspittle to ASH is going to end in anything other than tears.
Reader Comments (1)
Tobacco provides pleasure and encourages sociability, protects against obesity (helping avoid conditions such as diabetes and joint deterioration), sharpens reflexes (helping avoid automobile accidents and falls), improves cognition, and eases depression and anxiety. People who quit smoking, often experience a decline, rather than an improvement, in their health--especially if they gain a lot of weight. Many centenarians have long smoking histories.