Our mission statement has said the same thing since the day we wrote it. The truth is vaping works, and we want the world to know.
Today, Cochrane put a number on it.
Cochrane is the highest bar in medicine. Not a campaign group, not a manufacturer, nothing to sell. It is the organisation doctors and health services use to work out what the evidence actually says, and it deals in trials rather than press releases. When Cochrane says it is certain about something, that is the end of an argument, not the start of one.
So here is what it said.
Eighty trials. Twenty-nine thousand people.
Six people in every hundred stop smoking using patches or gum. Eight to ten in every hundred stop using a nicotine vape.
Cochrane rates its certainty in that finding as high. That is the top of four tiers, and in their language it means more research is not going to change the answer. Eleven versions of this review, and that is the strongest verdict it has ever reached.
Now the bit that should have led the news
Put every stop-smoking aid there is on one table. Over three hundred trials. More than a hundred and fifty thousand people. Cochrane again.
Nicotine vapes sit at the top. Fourteen quitters in every hundred. Level with varenicline. Level with cytisine. Ahead of a patch and gum together at twelve, well ahead of a patch on its own at nine, and more than double the six in a hundred who go it alone on willpower.
Nothing outperforms a vape.
And of the three things sitting at the top of that table, a vape is the only one you do not need a prescription for. You do not need an appointment. You do not need to wait. You can walk into a shop this afternoon.
That is what "the best way to quit smoking" means when we say it. It is not a slogan we invented for a poster. It is the top row of the table, and we have been pointing at it for years while being told we would say that, wouldn't we.
The NHS worked this out a while ago
Swap to Stop handed free vape kits to a million smokers in England. Not a pilot. A million.
Four weeks in, 34% of the people who took a kit had stopped smoking. Where a stop smoking service properly logged the attempt, it was 54%. At roughly £113 per person who quit.
Read that again. The state hands out vapes, because handing out vapes works, and it works cheaper than almost anything else in public health.
So here is what makes us angry
54% of British adults still believe vaping is as harmful as smoking, or worse.
More than half the country. And a smoker who believes that has no reason on earth to switch, because why would you swap one thing that kills you for another thing that kills you?
That is not an academic problem. Two in three lifelong smokers die of it. Around six million people in this country are still smoking, and every single one of them who reads a scare headline, decides vaping is just as bad, and lights another cigarette has been talked out of the most effective thing available to them.
Two and a half million adults in Britain got off cigarettes with a vape in the last five years. The rest are still being told there was no point.
One more line, and it is the most important one
Every single trial in that review used a regulated product. The senior author said so herself, unprompted:
"Anyone looking to use e-cigarettes to quit smoking should only purchase devices that have been tested and approved by their country's regulatory body."
Dr Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, senior author, naming the MHRA for the UK.
So let's be precise about who this evidence belongs to. It belongs to the legal market. It belongs to the manufacturers who submit their products, and to the shops that check ID and buy compliant stock. It has never said one word in favour of the bloke selling out of a holdall outside a school gate, because he has never been in a single trial.
Which is why we keep asking the Government to license our own customers.
The Tobacco and Vapes Act got Royal Assent in April. It contains a retail licensing scheme. That scheme has not been switched on. Switch it on. Licence every seller, supermarkets and websites included. Put the strictest rules on any shop a child can walk into. Create a proper adult-only specialist tier, age checked at the door. Then take the licence off anyone who sells to a kid.
Cancer Research UK funded this review. This morning its prevention policy manager said governments across the UK "must implement the Act in full in every nation". CRUK campaigns for tighter regulation of companies like ours and will carry on doing it, and they have not endorsed a word we say. Notice anyway that we are both pointing at the same unused piece of law.
Now hold that next to the last six weeks
On 10 July the Government opened a consultation proposing that vapes be sold in standardised white packs, that devices come in one matt shade of white, black or grey, that flavour names be cut back to a single word, and that displays be restricted with no exemption for the specialist shops that do nothing else all day.
On 23 July vape shops turned up in a business rates announcement about anti-social behaviour, filed alongside the businesses this Government would like to see fewer of on the high street.
On 11 August new vape shops in England were told they will need planning permission.
Then today, Cochrane published the strongest evidence ever assembled that what those shops sell is the most effective way to stop smoking in the country.
All four of those happened. Only one of them is true.
What the industry actually did
Adult smoking in this country is down to around 10%. For the first time in the history of the cigarette, more adults in Britain vape than smoke — 5.4 million against 5.3 million. Two and a half million adults got off cigarettes with a vape in the last five years alone.
That is the biggest public health win of the decade and it did not come from a poster campaign. It came from a product adult smokers actually wanted to use, made by companies who put it through testing, sold by shops that check ID and stock legal stock. The specialist on the high street who spends twenty minutes on a forty quid sale has moved more people off cigarettes than most of us will meet in a lifetime.
Those are the shops that got named in a press release about anti-social behaviour.
And this is why the consultation matters more than any of it
Go back to that 54%.
More than half the country already believes vaping is as harmful as smoking. The Government's proposed answer to that is to take the most effective quitting aid there is, put it in a plain white box, strip the flavour off the label, and hide it behind a shutter. Next to the cigarettes. Dressed like the cigarettes.
You cannot correct a dangerous misunderstanding by making the two products look identical. You will deepen it. That is not a prediction, it is the entire mechanism of the misunderstanding in the first place. Nobody switches to something that looks worse than what they are leaving.
We said in July that the Government is about to dress the cure like the disease. Yesterday Cochrane put its highest certainty rating behind the word cure.
The consultation closes at 11:59pm on Friday 2 October. It is the only one of those four things still open to change. It takes about ten minutes at savevaping.co.uk — a letter to your MP, a guided response, and the Relapse Register if you are one of the people these rules would put back on cigarettes.
If you quit smoking with a vape, you are the evidence. Yesterday a Cochrane review counted 29,861 people like you. Go and be counted once more.
Where that leaves you
If you switched from cigarettes and stayed switched, you did the single most effective thing available to you. The evidence said so yesterday, at the highest certainty it issues. You never needed our permission and you certainly do not need anyone else's.
If you are still smoking, your local NHS stop smoking service is free, almost all of them offer vapes now, and the people there do this all day. Prefer to start with us? Our guide on how to quit smoking for good shows what you'll save, what happens to your body the moment you stop, and a real plan from Riot Rehab.
Eighty trials. Twenty-nine thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one people. Highest certainty available.
Give smoking the finger.
