Vape Flavor Bans Can Result In Cigarette Sales Increasing

New peer-reviewed research published today in the Harm Reduction Journal demonstrates that flavors assume a role in drawing in - and retaining - smokers into the vaping category, directly adding to cigarette sales.

"The results demonstrate that non-tobacco flavors, especially natural product based flavors, are being increasingly preferred to tobacco enhances by grown-up vapers who have completely switched from combustible cigarettes to vapor items," said Dr Christopher Russell, Deputy Director of CSUR, who led the research.

The survey, one of the largest of its kind to center around flavors, conducted by the Center for Substance Use Research (CSUR) and funded by Fontem Ventures, assessed the main flavor and current e-vapor item enhance used by over 20,000 grown-up frequent vapers in the United States. The lion's share of frequent e-vapor item users, who had completely switched from smoking cigarettes to utilizing vaping items, are appeared to have increasingly likely initiated vaping with non-tobacco enhances, and to have transitioned from tobacco to non-tobacco enhances over time.

Of the 20,836 grown-up frequent e-vapor item users in the survey, nearly 16,000 had completely switched to from smoking to vaping, while 5,000 were double users who were smoking and utilizing e-vapor items.

In the investigation the most prominent currently used e-vapor enhances in the US were natural product/organic product beverage, where up to 82.9% of sampled users reporting regular purchase and use of vape fluids in this category, with dessert/baked good flavors next at 68.5%. Tobacco and menthol flavors ranked as the fifth and sixth most well known currently used flavors, respectively. "The information suggest that U.S. vapers' journeys towards stopping smoking are increasingly likely to begin with, progress to, or be sustained by frequent use of vaping devices containing non-tobacco flavors", said Dr Russell.

Commenting on the new research, Dr Grant O'Connell, Corporate Affairs Manager at Fontem Ventures said "The declining ubiquity of tobacco flavors among grown-up vapers emphatically suggests that flavor bans like the one recently passed in San Francisco*, could see vapers return to cigarette smoking and discourage other grown-up smokers from exchanging."

The examination additionally looked at the flavor first time users regularly used when beginning to vape. The extent of first vaping item purchases that were natural product flavored increased from 17.8% of first purchases made before 2011, to 33.5% first purchases made between June 2015 and June 2016. Tobacco-flavored first purchases nearly halved amid this time from 46.0% pre-2011, to 24.0% between 2015-2016.