Smoking and Vaping Prevalence Charts That the FDA and CDC Don’t Want You to See

 

My colleague and I have published a new article in Harm Reduction Journal entitled “Joint Smoking-Vaping Prevalence Rates Among American Youth and Young Adults 2011-2022.”  This post is dedicated to U.S. federal government officials, especially at the FDA Center for Tobacco Products and the CDC Office of Smoking and Health.  Despite having smoking and vaping data from federal surveys for the past thirteen years, those officials have never published joint prevalence rates.

 

 

I present two charts on the left, but please read the full article for more information (here).  The charts speak for themselves, so I won’t bore you with unnecessary details.  The first shows that smoking among high schoolers has basically disappeared at the same time that vaping skyrocketed up…then down.  Note that the vertical axis is the same for both charts, topping out at 30%.  So while the high school vaping rate was very volatile with sharp increases and declines, vaping in young adults age 18-20 was much more stable.  But the smoking rate went down and stayed there, suggesting that these general trends are likely to continue.  Which means that in 25 to 30 years, smoking-related diseases will disappear too. 

 

 

My final chart, below, shows quit ratios (QRs) for all adult age groups in our study.  QRs, which are the prevalence of former smoking divided by the prevalence of ever smoking X 100, are a well-established and meaningful measure of quitting success among a population.  Once again, very little explanation is needed.  Whereas QRs among the younger age groups were low in 2011, all are above 50% now.  Note especially the extraordinary one-year increase in the QR among emerging young adults, from 53% in 2022 to 73% in 2023. 

 

Nota Bena.  Discerning readers will notice that the figures in this blog contain one more year (i.e. 2023) than our HRJ article.  The reason is that the article was in review for over 12 months, during which time the 2023 data was released by the CDC.  My colleague and I considered updating the article, but we feared that it would prompt more months of delay.