‘If you don’t smoke, don’t vape’ message is getting lost. Does it matter?

Chug on a Lost Mary and change your life for the better. That’s the message (pretty much) of medical experts and health authorities, who have heralded vaping as something of a miracle, in their effort to stop the UK population from smoking tobacco.

And it’s little wonder. Vapes have proved a blisteringly effective smoking cessation tool. According to the NHS, tobacco smokers are roughly twice as likely to quit if they use a nicotine vape compared with products like patches or gum.

The general consensus is nicotine itself is addictive, but not especially harmful – something akin to caffeine. Until vaping’s arrival, ciggies had been the main method of getting a hit of the stimulant – carried on thousands of other chemicals and causing immense harm to the UK’s health.

With vaping, however, “most of the chemicals causing smoking-related disease are absent and the chemicals which are present pose limited danger”, according to Public Health England. An independent review published by the body in 2015 found vaping was around 95% safer for users than smoking. That’s a view government health experts have maintained ever since.

So, as England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, plainly put it last year: “If you smoke, vaping is much safer.” But he wasn’t finished. “If you don’t smoke, don’t vape,” he added.

The second part of his quote would appear to be getting lost. New research published today has found the number of adults vaping in England who have never regularly smoked has rocketed. The UCL study – published in Lancet Public Health and funded by Cancer Research UK – estimates that, as of April this year, around one million adults in England who never regularly smoked now vape, most of them on a daily basis. That represents a sevenfold increase since 2021.

The one million count is shocking, but perhaps not that surprising. Vapes are more available than ever, and in easy-to-use formats. They have gained huge publicity – good and bad – through public health messaging, media coverage of industry scandals, and the moral panic of underage use. And, of course, the huge plumes of vapour from users make them highly visible on the street.

But maybe the million vaping isn’t as big a concern as it might seem. The UCL study’s lead author Dr Sarah Jackson said the level of concern would “depend on what these people would otherwise be doing”. If they’ve taken up vaping instead of taking up smoking (or some other damaging addiction), that’s a positive.

John Dunne, UKVIA director general, takes a similar view. He tells The Grocer: “It is impossible to say if their cohort, whether experimenting with cigarettes already or not, would not have become smokers were it not for vapes. The authors themselves also note that some people have genes and circumstances leading them to like nicotine products. Traditionally, they ended up smoking, but some are now discovering vaping without becoming smokers first. If vaping did not exist, they would be smoking.”

A further complication is the tricky task of warning non-smokers off vaping. The message that vaping is good versus cigarettes are bad is simpler than getting across an escalating scale of harm, where abstinence is at the bottom, vaping somewhere in the middle and smoking at the top.

And even that simple bad/good message is not landing as well as hoped. According to ASH’s latest annual survey on the use of vaping among Brits, half of all smokers wrongly believe vaping is as harmful or more harmful than smoking.

Regardless of that misunderstanding, vaping actually being less harmful does not mean it’s harmless. And the long-term impacts of vaping are still relatively unknown. Absent is the narrative of vaping as a big step towards quitting nicotine completely, not the endgame in itself. Meanwhile, quitting vaping is hard, especially given so little support is available. Anecdotally, some vapers are swapping devices for cigarettes in the hope their quitting attempt will be spurred by the social stigma and expense involved.

All of which amounts to a knotty communication challenge for heath tsars – one that urgently needs to be addressed before more ex-smokers turn back to tobacco. Or another million non-smokers take up vaping.