Fruit-flavoured vapes are now a major part of UK stop smoking support, according to research by the Brussels-based Clearing The Air organisation. Vapes are widely incorporated into stop smoking services, the study says, with ‘flavoured vaping products commonly included within cessation support pathways’.
The researchers used FoI requests to study how services are providing vaping products to people trying to quit smoking, with all but one of 28 local authorities contacted saying they provided vapes. While none of the local authority services reported supplying disposable vapes, flavours were ‘central to the offer’. All 27 services that provided vapes offered flavours, with 15 of the 19 that provided ‘useful information on flavour popularity or frequency of supply’ saying that fruit was the most popular category. Other forms of support varied across services, the report adds, with some offering nicotine replacement therapy, some behavioural support, and others a combination of both.
Flavour restrictions, however, remain ‘one of the fiercest arguments in UK vaping policy’, the researchers point out, with harm reduction campaigners citing them as a useful quitting aid while opponents call for them to be prohibited as they can appeal to young people. Delegates at the Global Forum on Nicotine earlier this month heard that as well as outright bans on safer nicotine products in many counties, the ‘spirit of prohibition’ was also evident in policies such as bans on vape flavouring.
The Tobacco and Vapes Act, which passed into law earlier this year, contains provisions to tighten regulations around both vape flavours and packaging. According to leading anti-smoking charity ASH, however, the government’s consultation on these measures is likely to focus on how to regulate the products to ensure they don’t appeal to young people – ‘without deterring adults who smoke from switching to vaping or causing adults who vape to go back to smoking tobacco, which is much more harmful’.
While the Clearing the Air study ‘doesn’t prove fruit flavours cause higher quit rates’ it does show that ‘in real-world stop-smoking services, fruit flavours are being widely supplied to adult smokers as part of cessation support’, the researchers state.
The authors acknowledge that, as the findings are based on responses from selected local authorities, they offer a ‘snapshot’ rather than a full overview of service provision in the UK. ‘The findings should therefore be read as real-world service data rather than proof that any single flavour or product type causes higher quit rates,’ they state. ‘What they do show is still significant – many UK stop-smoking services are supplying vapes directly, often through refillable devices, and fruit flavours appear to be the leading choice.’
An assessment of the provision of vaping products by UK stop smoking services using data from freedom of information requests is published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science and available here