Article posted on Vaping360 - Author: Jim McDonald - Translator: The Vape Club
Dr. Brad Rodu estimated the number of vapers based on the results of the CDC's most recent survey.
How many American vapers are there? The answer to that question depends a lot on who you ask, but Dr. Brad Rodu probably has the best estimate. He did a thorough study of the 2015 NHIS (National Health Survey) survey results and came up with some pretty interesting numbers. He wrote about it in a recent blog post.
The NHIS is conducted annually by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and its data and results are used to estimate the number of smokers nationwide. It is one of the surveys whose data is used by a number of government health agencies.
Dr. Rodu is a professor at the University of Louisville and a tobacco harm reduction researcher. He is a member of the university’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center. He has been researching and writing about tobacco use and harm reduction for twenty years, much of his research on snus and other smokeless tobacco products.
Smoking rates continue to decline
Rodu believes the survey results underestimate the number of smokers in the country, but the good news is that the number of smokers is falling. “In 2014, the number of smokers fell below 40 million for the first time in the 50 years since the NHIS began tracking smokers,” he wrote. “In 2015, the number dropped even further, to 36.5 million.”
These results are in line with other recent surveys.
Among adults, smoking rates have declined the most among the youngest. Between 2005 and 2015, smoking among 15- to 24-year-olds fell from 24.4 percent to 13 percent. “This will be a major public health benefit,” Rodu said, “because the reduction in youth smoking will result in fewer smoking-related illnesses and deaths in the future.”
Many smokers have become vapers
The percentage of people who vape between 2014 and 2015 only dropped by about 7 percent. But that’s only because fewer smokers also vape. “The majority of respondents to the NHIS survey were either smokers or vapers, whether they used the product regularly or occasionally,” Rodu explains. “In both years, 22-23 percent of smokers also vaped daily, while the rest vaped an average of more than seven days a month.”
The number of former smokers who switched to vaping increased by 26 percent from 2014 to 2015, to about 2.5 million. Of that group, 66 percent vaped regularly. There were also more than a million vapers who had never smoked cigarettes — but only 21 percent of them vaped regularly.
And here are the results. There are about 3.5 million adults in the US who are vapers who have never smoked. And about 1.9 million of those people vape regularly.
Vape users will not use cigarettes afterwards
Rodu doesn’t believe that former vapers prove that vaping is the reason for the decline in smoking rates. But he says, “these data do not prove that vaping is normalizing smoking.” In other words, even if vaping isn’t the reason for the decline in smoking rates, we also don’t see a way for vapers to switch to smoking.
“It is an undeniable fact,” Rodu writes, “that e-cigarettes are used by 2.5 million former smokers, but they are not the only cause of the decline in smoking rates.”
