Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Cigarettes are the second most popular way to quit vaping in an ASH survey of UK adults
Action on Smoking and Health surveys found 19% of 940 UK adults, and 14% of a New Zealand sample, used cigarettes to try to quit vaping. Both figures count quit attempts and leave open how many people stayed on cigarettes.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Talbot Mills Research ran the New Zealand survey for ASH, drawing its sample from 623 current smokers and 1,070 former smokers.
- A UT Southwestern study of 20,771 respondents found the share rating e-cigarettes more harmful than cigarettes rose from 3% in 2012 to 30% in 2022.
- The FDA says its Real Cost campaign kept more than 444,000 American youth from starting to use e-cigarettes in 2023 and 2024.
- CDC data put US adult smoking at 9.1% in 2025, down from 42.4% in 1965.
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Why it matters
- constraint Because both surveys count attempts, they cannot yet separate a brief detour through cigarettes from a relapse, so estimates of lasting harm or of any sales effect need follow-up data.
- decision ASH's call for 'clear, honest communication' forces campaigns built on vaping's harms to decide whether to start stating its risk relative to smoking.
- cost If the quit attempts harden into smoking, vapers bear the cost of moving to a product Siegel calls 'orders of magnitude higher-risk' than the one they left.
E-cigarettes were largely designed to move people in one direction, from combustible cigarettes to a nicotine product with fewer adverse health effects [12]. The two ASH percentages measure movement the other way, in two different populations. New Zealand's 14% comes from 1,693 people who all smoke or used to [1]. If the share applies to the whole sample, it is about 237 people [2]. The UK's 19% of 940 adults comes to about 179 people [3], and it counts people who tried cigarettes as a quitting aid [2].
A cigarette used to quit vaping can end in three ways: a short detour before dropping nicotine altogether, a lasting relapse into the more dangerous product, or a sampling artefact from a panel made up entirely of smokers and former smokers [1]. I think the surveys show that the reverse route is real, and common enough in the UK sample to rank second among ways people tried to quit vaping [2]. They do not show a change in how many people smoke. Michael Siegel, a professor of public health and community medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, takes the same position on prevalence [14]. "The data doesn't show it," he said. "We're not seeing any kind of uptake in youth smoking." [10]
The counter-case comes from ASH itself. "This is not just a trivial misunderstanding," Ben Youdan, ASH's director, said in the New Zealand report. "It's misinformation to the point of significant harm." [5] My view is wrong if follow-up surveys find the people who used cigarettes to quit vaping still smoking months later, or if smoking rises among the roughly 7% of American adults who vape [4].
Siegel attributes the reversal to anti-smoking messages that overcorrected on the dangers of vaping relative to smoking [14]. The UT Southwestern figures fit his account. The share of respondents rating e-cigarettes as worse than cigarettes rose tenfold over the decade [4], and by 2022 it was 13 points larger than the share rating them safer [5]. "Smoking is orders of magnitude higher-risk than vaping," Siegel told Fortune [6].
The FDA expanded its youth "Real Cost" campaign from combustible tobacco to e-cigarettes [13], and the result it publicises counts e-cigarette starts prevented [11]. Fortune's report does not link either survey to sales of cigarettes or vapes [1][2].
In the US, smokers still outnumber vapers by about 1.3 to 1 [7], even after adult smoking fell 33.3 points since 1965 [6]. Smoking causes about 480,000 US deaths a year [7]. As of February 2020, vaping-linked lung injury had been tied to 68 deaths [8], a cumulative count set against an annual one.
What to watch
- Follow-up data showing whether people who used cigarettes to quit vaping were still smoking months later.
- The CDC's next adult smoking reading against 9.1% for 2025, particularly among the roughly 7% of adults who vape.
- Whether the FDA's Real Cost campaign or ASH change their vaping messages to state risk relative to smoking.