Hints About Smokers Quitting with E-Cigarettes in National Cancer Institute Survey

 

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) released a Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS 7, 2024) earlier this spring.  I previously used this survey to illustrate the extensive damage caused by mainstream medicine’s campaign against e-cigarettes, which has resulted in American smokers’ misperception about the relative safety of vaping vs. smoking (here and here).  HINTS 7 does not ask about harm perception, but it does ask if participants “believe that any of the following tobacco products can help people quit smoking cigarettes? - Electronic nicotine devices (ENDS), like e-cigarettes.” 

The results for smokers, described in the table and the following chart, are fascinating. 

It is striking, though not unexpected, that current vapers have the strongest belief that e-cigarettes can help people quit smoking, even though the only group over 50% is “former” smokers.  Still, even among “former” vapers, the belief was 22% to 47%.  

Tragically, only 5% of “current” smokers who had never used e-cigarettes believed they would aid quitting.  This is proof that the erroneous message promoted by the American Medical Association and other prohibitionists (discussed last week here) is working, when, in fact, we have population evidence that smokers are switching (here and here), and two smoking cessation trials reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019 and 2024 clearly demonstrate that vapor products help smokers quit.

The HINTS survey tells us how many Americans were smokers and vapers in 2024 (see Note).  The following chart shows that there are fewer than a million 18-24 year-olds who only smoke, and vaping is popular among the majority of 25-34 year-olds.  However, 18.7 million of the 21.8 million exclusive smokers in this survey are age 35 and older.  These are the smokers who desperately need truthful information about the relative safety of vapes and their usefulness for quitting, in order to avoid untimely morbidity and mortality.   

 

Note: Although the HINTS survey is not used to count smokers and vapers, I compared these findings with numbers from the 2023 National Health Interview Survey, the instrument the CDC uses.  The numbers were comparable in all age categories.