Electronic cigarettes are helping as many people to give up tobacco as other methods combined, research suggests.
About 20,000 “vapers” gave up smoking in 2014 who would not otherwise have quit. Experts said that e-cigarettes were saving lives in a “consumer revolution” outside the NHS.
The figures represent a relatively small proportion of Britain’s 8.5 million smokers, suggesting that vaping is unlikely to drive smoking to extinction any time soon. About 200,000 people quit smoking long-term each year, mostly without help.
An estimated 2.2 million people use e-cigarettes, which are thought to be safer than conventional cigarettes because they give a nicotine hit without tobacco. Their growing popularity has led some to hope that millions of smokers could switch to a relatively harmless alternative. However, public health experts fear that vaping could undermine tobacco control by making smoking seem normal again, pointing out that the long-term safety of e-cigarettes is unproven.
Trials have found that smokers who use e-cigarettes when trying to quit are 50 per cent more likely to stay off tobacco than those who use alternative methods. About 900,000 people used an e-cigarette in an attempt to quit in 2014, many more than other methods.
Advertisement
Robert West, from University College London, who led the latest study, said: “E-cigarettes are achieving their effect by virtue of numbers.”
Only 5 per cent of those who try to quit smoking without help stay off tobacco. Applying the higher quit rate of 50 per cent to those using e-cigarettes would suggest that 22,000 quitters would otherwise have failed.
Taking into account a lower use of stop-smoking medicines could bring this down to 16,000, Professor West calculates in the journal Addiction. He estimates that about 20,000 to 25,000 people a year quit using methods such as medicine and specialist support.
“E-cigarettes appear to be helping a significant number of smokers to stop who would not have done otherwise — not as many as some e-cigarette enthusiasts claim, but a substantial number nonetheless,” he said.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the anti-smoking charity Ash, said: “This shows that electronic cigarettes can save lives.”
Advertisement
She added: “Half all long-term smokers die prematurely, on average ten years early, from smoking. Smokers using e-cigarettes to quit are significantly more successful than those going cold turkey or using NRT [nicotine replacement therapy] gum or patches.”
Linda Bauld, from the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, said: “From these data, it is clear that electronic cigarettes are appealing to smokers trying to stop and have helped a significant number of people in England to move away from tobacco.
“E-cigarettes have also saved the public purse money in the short term, as they are not medicines but instead products which people choose to buy themselves. This ‘consumer revolution’ . . . may well be saving lives.”
However, a spokeswoman for the Faculty of Public Health said: “We also know that people may switch from smoking cigarettes to vaping, or continue with both habits. The latter in particular is a cause for public health concern, because no one knows yet what the long-term health effects of vaping will be.”
Lorien Jollye, a vaping activist, said that rather than focusing on precise numbers, public health experts “would do better to make sure smokers are aware that vaping is considered 95 per cent safer than smoking”.
