A new briefing paper from the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction ( GSTHR ) points out that not only will the proportion of adults who smoke likely have fallen to just over ten per cent next year , but the proportion of vapers will have overtaken it . It will be a landmark moment , especially considering that when ONS first started compiling smoking statistics 50 years ago , more than half of men smoked , along with 41 per cent of women .

The document highlights that the large-scale shift to vaping , while clearly consumer-driven , has also been helped by successive UK governments making ‘ pragmatic policy decisions based on the evidence ’, publishing the science on the safety of vapes compared to smoking , and endorsing and promoting their use as a smoking cessation tool .

CONTROVERSY AND CONFUSION But vaping remains controversial . While PHE stated in 2018 that it was 95 per cent less harmful than smoking tobacco , and anti-smoking charity ASH has long backed vapes as an effective quitting tool ( while also expressing concerns about levels of youth vaping ), the WHO ’ s position is that ‘ strong decisive action is needed to prevent the uptake of e-cigarettes ’.

Add in the extensive media coverage and it ’ s not surprising there ’ s a great deal of confusion around . Last year , a YouGov survey of more than 12,000 people found that just under 40 per cent of smokers thought vaping was ‘ as or more risky ’ than smoking ( www . drinkanddrugsnews . com / four-in-ten-smokersbelieve-vaping-is-as-harmful /), which prompted ASH to issue a ‘ myth buster ’ to challenge ‘ common misrepresentations of the evidence ’. The document summed up the argument by quoting chief medical officer Chris Whitty : ‘ If you smoke , vaping is much safer ; if you don ’ t smoke , don ’ t vape .’

‘ A lot of the rhetoric around vaping , and the quite legitimate concerns about young people vaping , ends up creating a slightly toxic environment ,’ David MacKintosh , a director at Knowledge Action Change ( KAC ) which runs the GSTHR project , tells DDN . ‘ But one of the reasons the UK is in a better position than some other places is that we ’ ve had people in PHE who were prepared to say this is a good thing , and a cadre of academics who ’ ve done the research and have the evidence – the work coming out of UCL is always very balanced , for example .’

While some people argue that vapes haven ’ t been around long enough to fully understand the potential health effects , we ’ re now ‘ starting to get to the point where we ’ ve actually got a pretty long exposure window ’, says MacKintosh . ‘ Inevitably there will be some issues – it ’ s not a healthy thing to do – but I ’ m sure we ’ ll be able to shoot some of the wilder foxes in terms of health effects .’

NEGATIVE COVERAGE In the meantime , however , the negative coverage does have an impact . One example is

the ambitious ‘ swap to stop ’ campaign , which aims to provide nearly one in five smokers with a vape starter kit alongside other support to help them quit . ‘ The smoking cessation people and people working with homeless populations and in drug services , I think they get it ,’ MacKintosh states . ‘ But when you ’ re trying to get local buy-in from the cabinet member for health , or whoever , that headline about “ are they really safer , do we really know ?” can have a chilling effect . I ’ ve seen it time and again with the drugs stuff , because those people aren ’ t necessarily experts and they are influenced by what ’ s in the paper or on the news . So the scheme has probably got a little bit lost , which is a shame because the potential was incredible . I can ’ t think of an equivalent public health campaign with that sort of ambition , that was realisable in a short , measurable timeframe .’

One problem is undoubtedly that people tend to see the hand of big tobacco in all this . But while the industry has certainly ‘ played catch-up ’, most of the safer nicotine products didn ’ t originate with

Jack Sullivan / Alamy