New Study Shows that E-Cigarettes Help Young Adult Smokers to Quit

A new study published yesterday in the journal Addiction provides evidence that rather than serving as a gateway to smoking, the use of e-cigarettes helps young adult smokers to quit smoking completely.

Excerpts of the study abstract follow:

"Latent growth modeling was used to model daily cigarette smoking over time. Models using past-month ENDS use, past-month smoking/vaping cannabis, and past-month co-use of ENDS and cannabis (using ENDS and smoking/vaping cannabis within the past month) as time-varying covariates were tested.

Findings: Over time, there was a tendency towards cessation of daily combustible cigarette use among this smoking sample. Smoking/vaping cannabis was associated with a decreased rate of daily combustible cigarette cessation among the sample, whereas ENDS use was associated with an increased rate of daily smoking cessation. The predicted additive effect of using ENDS and smoking/vaping cannabis was not significant.

Conclusions: Among young adult daily cigarette smokers, smoking cannabis, on its own, poses a risk to quitting combustible cigarettes, while using ENDS may promote cigarette cessation, possibly through substitution."

The Rest of the Story

This study is important because it adds to the body of knowledge refuting the claim that vaping is a gateway to smoking among young people. While there was already incontrovertible evidence that e-cigarettes are associated with decreased, rather than increased smoking among adolescents, this study adds the same finding for young adults. This means that for young people in general, there is no evidence that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking. In contrast, there is strong evidence that e-cigarettes are a substitute for real cigarettes and therefore promote smoking cessation.

This study supports the findings of a 2023 study which found that e-cigarettes significantly enhance smoking cessation among adults. And they responded to the clinical trial evidence of the effectiveness of e-cigarettes by arguing that those results were only valid in the clinical trial setting but not in real life. These two studies refute that argument because they took place outside the setting of any clinical trial and the use of e-cigarettes was self-directed.

Opponents of vaping have been arguing for years that there is no evidence that e-cigarettes aid smoking cessation. There is now strong evidence from both clinical trials and observational studies not only that e-cigarettes substantially aid smoking cessation but that they are actually more effective than "FDA-approved" strategies such as nicotine patches and gum.

Will this new evidence change the positions of tobacco control groups? Of course not. Because they aren't truly concerned about the science. They are primarily concerned with promoting their agenda of abstinence.