Vaping for smoking cessation

Given that smoking tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death and chronic illness, it is encouraging to see in NHS Digital's (2019) newly published annual figures that the proportion of cigarette smokers in England has fallen somewhat from 14.9% in 2017 to 14.4% in 2018. The Government has also recently made several new and, some, very bold proposals in a Prevention Green Paper called ‘Advancing our health: prevention in the 2020s', including one to make England smoke-free by 2030 (British Heart Foundation, 2019).

One of the ways in which tobacco smoking is decreasing, however, is through the use of e-cigarettes as a stop-smoking aid. As tobacco use has declined by 0.5% between 2017 and 2018, the number of e-cigarette users has increased by 0.8% in this same time period (The Pharmaceutical Journal, 2019a; 2019b).