There are fewer people in the United Kingdom smoking now than there have ever been before, according to new government statistics, and each local vape supplier may have had a role to play in this.
The Office for National Statistics has regularly published an annual report on smoking habits in the UK which is typically published in December of each year, sorted in a variety of different ways.
The headline figure of this data, however, is that 13.3 per cent of the population (around 6.6m people) aged over 18 currently smoke, which is down nearly 7 per cent compared to when the figures were first collated in 2011 (20.2 per cent).
This has continued a trend of continuous decline in people smoking that began in the mid-1970s, reached a convergence point with rising quit rates in 1982 and has only intensified since.
The survey itself acknowledges the effect of vapes in these statistics, but the reasons why people have moved away from cigarettes and in favour of vaping, with the increase in people quitting coinciding with an increase in people taking up e-cigarettes, are surprisingly broad.
Here are a few reasons why people abandoned cigarettes.
Vaping Was A Much Closer Alternative
When Dr Hon Lik first talked about the Ruyan, the pioneering e-cigarette brand he had developed, he considered it to be for cigarettes what the digital camera was for analogue film cameras. In other words, it was a device that provided the same hit and sensation but with far less of the dangers.
Nicotine products such as gums, patches and implants had existed for decades, but they could only help with the chemical part of tobacco addiction. The psychological part fixated on other aspects of smoking that would, for people who had been smoking for a long time, become ritualistic.
It wasn’t entirely like-for-like, but it was much closer, and as prices reduced and vape devices became more versatile, people started to make the switch.
This is also why disposable vapes have become so important in the fight against smoking.
The Seeds Of Doubt Were Plucked
People have known about the dangers of smoking since the 1950s, and public information campaigns on smoking started to intensify in the UK starting in the 1970s, and in the following few decades, there would be major clampdowns on how cigarettes could be marketed and sold.
A lot of people knew about the dangers of smoking, but by the 1990s, a wave of new, damning and ultimately insurmountable evidence was published into the dangers of smoking, not only to individuals but people they smoked close to, which removed the last seeds of doubt about their harm.
The Social Effect Of The Law
It must always be noted that law is often one of the biggest causes of behavioural change, but in the case of smoking, it happened in a rather unique way.
Banning smoking marketing helped a little bit, but the biggest reason why a lot of people quit involved the smoking ban, which made a lot of people choose between their habit and their social life.
This, combined with increased warnings on packets, the appearance of somewhat grisly images of smoke-ravaged organs, and later the plain packaging law, made smoking the opposite of socially desirable and acceptable.
