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.

 

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.