Is this the best way to get people to stop smoking?
Public Health England has announced
e-cigarettes are decidedly less harmful than traditional cigarettes:
Public Health England, which runs the National Health Service in the largest of the U.K.’s four nations, said that a review by independent experts had found e-cigarettes to be around 95% less harmful than smoking, and said popular perceptions that they were as harmful, or a gateway to more harmful cigarette smoking among younger users, were plain wrong.
It's the biggest endorsement of e-cigarettes to date. Below are several key findings from the
Public Health England report:
1. Smokers who have tried other methods of quitting without success could be encouraged to try e-cigarettes (EC) to stop smoking and stop smoking services should support smokers using EC to quit by offering them behavioural support.
2. Encouraging smokers who cannot or do not want to stop smoking to switch to EC could help reduce smoking related disease, death and health inequalities.
3. There is no evidence that EC are undermining the long-term decline in cigarette smoking among adults and youth, and may in fact be contributing to it. Despite some experimentation with EC among never smokers, EC are attracting very few people who have never smoked into regular EC use.
4. Recent studies support the Cochrane Review findings that EC can help people to quit smoking and reduce their cigarette consumption. There is also evidence that EC can encourage quitting or cigarette consumption reduction even among those not intending to quit or rejecting other support. More research is needed in this area.
5. When used as intended, EC pose no risk of nicotine poisoning to users, but e- liquids should be in ‘childproof' packaging. The accuracy of nicotine content labelling currently raises no major concerns.
You can read the full report at the link above. What does this mean for smokers in England? It means they may be able to get free e-cigarettes if they sign up for a program to stop smoking, something the government is willing to wage will be a cost-savings program
over the long term:
However, Public Health England has all but explicitly blessed handing out e-cigarettes for free to those who sign up for the NHS’s Stop Smoking help services, on the reasoning that the cost will be more than recouped in public health benefits (smoking-related diseases are still the U.K.’s biggest killer).
By contrast, a pack of 20 traditional cigarettes now costs upwards of $14. The economic incentives for the U.K.’s remaining 2.6 million smokers to abandon traditional cigarettes sooner rather than later are only piling up. If other health services follow the U.K.’s lead, tobacco’s slow death in the west could get a lot faster.