New Research Says Smokers Who Have Contact With Vapers Are More Likely To Stop Smoking
Yet more good news for vaping with research suggesting smokers that associate with vapers are more likely to attempt to quit smoking.
In the past it’s been suggested that vaping in some way normalizes smoking however this research blows yet another vape myth out of the water.
Scientists from University College London (UCL) looked at data gathered by the Smoking Toolkit Study between November 2014 and May 2018 which saw 12,787 people take part.
The basis of the study was to:
Concerns have been raised that observing other people using e-cigarettes may undermine motivation to quit by renormalising smoking. This study aimed to explore associations between regular exposure to other people’s e-cigarette use and motivation to stop smoking and quit attempts in smokers.</span
Researchers found that over a quarter of smokers said they spent time with vapers and of those 20% said because of that they’d recently made an attempt to quit the cancer sticks – whilst almost a third of smokers quizzed said they’d had a go at quitting in the previous 12 months.
It’s interesting to see it was just 26% of smokers who did NOT spend time with vapers that had made a quit attempt in the previous year. The facts are clear you’re more likely to get onto the quit smoking path if you spend time with vapers!
No Evidence Vaping Discourages Smokers From Quitting
It’s great news indeed however let’s hope the powers that be don’t get the idea to continue the irrational banning of vaping indoors and in some cases outdoors so that smokers and vapers can mix – I’ll explain my thoughts on that in a wee while.
Lead researcher Dr Sarah Jackson said it was good news for vaping adding:
It is becoming increasingly more commonplace for smokers to come into contact with vapers and some concerns have been raised that this could re-normalise smoking in England and undermine smokers’ motivation to quit.
Our results found no evidence that spending time with vapers discourages smokers from quitting, which should help to alleviate concerns about the wider public health impact of e-cigarettes.
As I said earlier whilst it’s great that smokers are indeed encouraged by being around vapers the last thing we want is vapers herded into the same areas as smokers. For [i] it gives out a bad message to the public that vaping is classed in the same way as smoking and [ii] whilst there’s no danger to bystanders from so called passive vaping – there is from passive smoking.
Cancer Research UK helped with the funding of the study and the charity’s tobacco control expert Kruti Shrotri said:
There hasn’t been much evidence about whether e-cigarettes might make smoking tobacco seem normal again. So it’s encouraging to see that mixing with people who vape is actually motivating smokers to quit.
As the number of people who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking rises, we hope that smokers who come into contact with them are spurred on to give up tobacco for good.
The study concludes:
In conclusion, the concern that the surge in popularity of e-cigarettes may be renormalising smoking in England and that this may discourage smokers from trying to stop appears unsupported by our findings. Our results indicate that, in fact, smokers who are regularly exposed to other people using e-cigarettes are more likely to be highly motivated to stop smoking and more likely to have made a recent quit attempt than smokers who do not regularly encounter people using e-cigarettes.
So there you have it far from us vapers encouraging people to become smokers – as some of the anti-vape crowd would have the public believe – the facts are vapers are literally health ambassadors encouraging people to quit the stinkies.
Now I reckon we need to set up some kind of Adopt a Smoker campaign 😉
You can read the full study on the BMC Medicine website.
