Analyzing data from the baseline 2013-14 FDA-funded
Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, my economist
colleague Dr. Nantaporn Plurphanswat and I have produced a comprehensive study
of e-cigarette use in the United States.
The research appears in the journal Nicotine
& Tobacco Research (abstract here).
The standard vaping definition has two components:
participants must have regularly vaped
AND now vape every day or some days. Using this definition, we estimate that there
were 5.5 million current e-cigarette users (2.4% of the U.S. population), of
which 2.3 million used them daily and 3.2 million used them some days.
However, there are 7.4 million participants who have NOT
“regularly vaped” but report that they use e-cigs every day or some days. It is important to count them too, and to
distinguish them from current users, so we call them “e-cigarette triers,” the
vast majority of whom (95%) use them some days.
The total of current users and triers is 12.9 million (or about 5.6% of
the population).
(In a recent blog entry (here)
I estimated that there were 8.9 million U.S. vapers in 2014, based on the National
Health Interview Survey [NHIS]. The fact
that the NHIS does not collect data on “regular” vaping likely accounts for the
difference with our new PATH-based 12.9 million estimate.)
The figure above shows that the vast majority of every day
current vapers were either current smokers (47%) or former smokers (46%). In contrast, most some day vapers and all e-cigarette
triers were current smokers, and the percentage of never smokers was higher in
these groups (discussed below).
PATH also collected more detailed cigarette smoking information
than did NHIS. In our new article we
note that we use a similar “…classification strategy…for estimates of cigarette
smoking. The number of current smokers in PATH was 41.5 million, and 80% were
daily smokers, which is consistent with the 2014 NHIS. However, there were also 7.1 million
cigarette triers, who are distinguished by being every day or some day smokers
who had not consumed 100 cigarettes in their lifetime. Triers do not fit the traditional definition
of current smokers, so we have included them as a subset of ‘never-smokers’ for
comparison with NHIS surveys, where they would have been classified as
never-smokers by answering ‘no’ to the 100-cigarette question and not being
asked about every or some day smoking. This is an indication that a substantial
number of American smokers may have been misclassified as never-smokers in
previous national surveys.”
These details illuminate critical characteristics of both
vapers and smokers. For example, as
shown the chart at left, the vast majority of vapers who “never smoked” according to the NHIS definition are
actually current or former cigarette triers.
Only a small fraction (7-11%) have never tried cigarettes. This finding refutes the common claim that
vaping attracts never smokers.
Other vaping insights gleaned from the PATH survey will be
discussed in a future post.
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