While It’s Stoptober in the UK, It’s Keep Smoking in The U.S. 

For more than a decade, the UK National Health Service (NHS) has used October to promote a public health campaign urging the 6.4 million smoking adults to quit during the month as part of “Stoptober.” According to officials, the campaign has been quite effective. Because of regulatory inaction and draconian prohibitions, October 2023 won’t be “Stoptober” for the estimated 36.5 million American adults who still continue to smoke.

It’s quite apparent that the refusal by American public health officials to embrace less harmful alternatives not only hinders any chance of a Stoptober, but is lessening declines in smoking rates overall.

The United Kingdom (UK) has embraced tobacco harm reduction. In 2017 (for the first time), the Stoptober campaign officially embraced e-cigarettes as an effective tool to help adults quit combustible cigarettes. The NHS is also actively addressing misinformation about vaping. On a webpage titled “Vaping myths and the facts,” the government health agency addresses the common misperception that vaping “is just as harmful as smoking,” with the UK government countering that while nicotine e-cigarettes are not entirely “risk-free,” they are “substantially less harmful than smoking.”

Adults in the UK have access to regulated tobacco harm reduction products, including a variety of heated tobacco and vapor products. In the United States, there are currently zero regulated heated tobacco devices available on market, and to date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only authorized the sale of 23 tobacco-flavored-only e-cigarette products.

This is a shame. According to a recent analysis of adult behavioral data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2022, more than 20 million American adults were using e-cigarettes. This is far greater than the estimated 3.1 to 3.2 million UK adults who were vaping in 2022.

Yet, the UK government encourages the use of e-cigarettes to adults who cannot quit smoking, while the U.S. forces our own smoking adults to rely on unregulated markets.

To date, flavored vaping products are banned in five states including California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. The FDA has not issued a single marketing order for any flavored vapor product – despite many of these products being on the market since before 2017. And federal lawmakers are seeking to tax e-cigarettes (and other less harmful tobacco products) at the same rate as combustible cigarettes.

It should be noted that there were an additional 2.7 million adult vapers in 2022 than in 2021.

This increase has come even without FDA or states recognizing flavored tobacco harm reduction products, and amid an onslaught of misinformation from public health trade associations. This increase has happened even while the medical community and its health professionals continue to be ignorant about the lack of harms associated with non-combusted nicotine.

This October – and every month – American policymakers should look at ways to not only inform the public of less harmful alternatives to smoking, but how they can encourage their use – just like the UK’s Stoptober campaign has effectively done.