Cost and convenience, the secret of a successful quit smoking tool

From Sunday (June 1) the sale of disposable vapes will be banned in the UK.

Yesterday I was asked to comment on that, and the claim that 200,000 former smokers may return to smoking tobacco.

Although I’m opposed to yet another ban - which feels like a knee-jerk reaction to youth vaping and an equally hysterical response to an environmental issue that could be solved through other means - I do think the prospect of ex-smokers relapsing is unlikely and probably a red herring.

A handful may go back to smoking, if they’re very weak-willed, but if you’ve successfully quit smoking why on earth would you return to cigarettes (which are far more expensive than vapes) when the market still offers plenty of options in terms of e-cigarettes?

A more credible argument is the one that says that some smokers who wish to quit may be disincentivised to do so if the cheapest and easiest to use e-cigarette is prohibited.

Without wishing to blow my own trumpet (or mix metaphors), I’ve been banging this drum longer than most people, even vaping advocates.

Back in 2016, for example, when many vaping activists were obsessed by coils and pods and eliquids, I wrote:

My gut feeling – based on no research whatsoever – is that if hundreds of millions of smokers worldwide are to switch to vaping the device has to be as simple to use as a combustible cigarette.

I base this on the observation that the main reason cigarettes were so popular in the 20th century was convenience.

Compare cigarettes to pipe-smoking. The late Lord Harris, chairman of Forest for 20 years until his death in 2006, was an enthusiastic pipe smoker. Then, in his early Eighties, he suddenly gave up.

I won't go into the circumstances (it was nothing to do with health) but the principal reason was the amount of paraphernalia he had to carry around – his pipe (or pipes), tobacco pouch, pipe cleaners, lighter and so on.

Throughout the 20th century I suspect many pipe smokers quit for the same reason, with many switching to cigarettes.

My guess is the majority of smokers will only switch to vaping if the device matches the convenience of cigarettes [because] what matters most to consumers is cost and convenience.

I envisaged an e-cigarette that was as simple, convenient, and pleasurable to use as a combustible cigarette, with no buttons to press, no eliquids to refill, and no batteries to recharge.

(The cigalike didn’t count because it was so basic it was little more than a baby’s dummy.)

I’m not sure when disposable vapes first appeared in the UK, but I think I called it correctly because it was the cost and convenience of disposable vapes that led to their popularity with sales peaking around 2020/21.

It seems a little foolish therefore to ban one of the principal products that has helped reduce smoking rates in the past decade.

But that’s public health campaigners for you, and they’re still not satisfied.

According to Hazel Cheeseman, CEO of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the ban on disposable vapes is merely a “useful first step”.

Which begs the question, what’s next?

See: Disposable vapes will soon be banned. Will it change anything? (The Times)