E-cigarette companies, including big ones like British American Tobacco, have been trying to influence governments in New Zealand and Australia. They want to relax the rules on vaping and stop stricter regulations from being introduced. One of their main arguments is that vaping might be helping young people in New Zealand switch from smoking traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes.
They base this claim on a study published in Lancet Public Health in 2020, which suggested that vaping is replacing smoking for teenagers. However, a new study published in Lancet Regional Health-Western Pacific in 2025, using the same data, disagrees with this conclusion.
Looking at the Evidence
The researchers used a method called logistic regression to analyze data from nearly 700,000 high school students (ages 14-15) between 1999 and 2023. They wanted to understand if vaping, which started to rise in New Zealand around 2010, had any effect on smoking rates among teenagers.
The main question was: Did vaping cause smoking rates to drop even faster, as the e-cigarette companies suggest? Or did vaping have the opposite effect, encouraging teens to start smoking, which is known as the "gateway effect"?
The results showed that while smoking rates have decreased in New Zealand over the years, this decline slowed down significantly after vaping became popular in 2010. In fact, if vaping hadn’t become widespread, the drop in smoking rates might have been much greater.
In 2023, about 12.6% of teens aged 14 and 15 had tried smoking, but this would have been only 6.6% if smoking had continued to decline at the same rate as before vaping. Similarly, the rate of regular smoking (at least once a week) was 3% in 2023, but it would have been only 1.8% without vaping.
The researchers also tested if the year 2010 was the right time to observe these changes and found that the results held up even when they tested different years between 2008 and 2018. They also ruled out cigarette price changes as the reason for the slowdown.
Problems with the 2020 Study
The 2020 study only looked at smoking trends between 2014 and 2019, a time when vaping had already become common among young people. It didn't examine whether the decline in smoking was slowing down, continuing as before, or speeding up. This led to the incorrect conclusion that vaping was responsible for the decline in smoking rates.
The new study, however, looks at a much longer period of data, starting before vaping became popular. It shows that smoking rates began to decline more slowly from 2010 onward, which suggests vaping might not be helping teens quit smoking, but possibly even contributing to them starting to smoke.
Why This Matters
The 2020 study has been used repeatedly by e-cigarette companies to argue against stronger vaping regulations. For example, British American Tobacco used it to argue against stricter e-cigarette laws in New Zealand and Australia. By misinterpreting the data, the 2020 study helped shape policies that may not be in the best interest of public health.
The new study challenges the idea that vaping is helping to replace smoking. Instead, it suggests that vaping could be leading more teenagers to start smoking. This highlights the need for policies that address both vaping and smoking, especially when it comes to protecting young people.
Countries considering laws that make vaping products easily available to adults should think carefully about how this might affect young people and whether it could lead to unintended consequences.
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