World No Tobacco Day: How Vaping Saved Millions of Lives—Including Mine

My tobacco addiction grabbed hold of me quietly and quickly—and I loved every minute of it. At first, smoking was an occasional pleasure I enjoyed on the weekends when I drank with my friends. I used to give away my leftover cigarettes when the festivities ended, but that didn't last long as the cravings took root. Pretty soon I was smoking every weekend, several times a week and eventually daily — a pack of Camel Lights. 

Taking up tobacco was one of the worst decisions I've ever made. It put me in harm's way and cost me thousands in my early 20s, when every dollar counted. But none of that mattered, because I enjoyed smoking so much. As I've noted before:

"I used to start my Saturdays with a pack of Camel Lights, a pot of coffee, and whatever book I was reading at the time ... few things in life were more pleasant than that smoke-filled morning ritual..."

From this point, many tobacco stories take a dark turn: people keep smoking for decades even as their health seriously deteriorates, because they can’t or don’t want to stop. I very likely would have been one of these lifelong smokers if it weren’t for one critical development in the nicotine market: e-cigarettes were introduced just a few years after I graduated to a pack-a-day habit.

These novel devices heat nicotine liquid into an aerosol that can be inhaled just like tobacco smoke. This is why e-cigarettes—now commonly called vapes—are such a revolutionary technology: they deliver the same dose of nicotine through a smoker’s preferred method without most of the carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco smoke. Most estimates indicate vaping is around 95% less harmful than smoking as a result.

After a few false starts and several months of vaping and smoking (dual use), I had completely given up tobacco. Along with some subsequent changes to my diet and exercise habits, this period marked a permanent lifestyle improvement. Each year during my annual physical, my doctor and I had the same conversation: “Are you off cigarettes?” “Yeah, just vaping now.” “Good—keep using that thing.”

I went on that way until early 2026, when I switched to nicotine pouches exclusively. Then I quit those a month ago. For the first time in more than 15 years, I am nicotine-free—a fact I gladly shared with an anti-vaping senator who was lamenting that FDA-approved vapes will “turbocharge nicotine addiction & rollback progress made in reducing youth tobacco use.” [1]

Accidental public health victory

Here's the point: there are millions of ex-smokers like me (and that adorable grandma pictured above). They're people who didn't want to quit and were unconcerned by the serious risks they were courting—tobacco is deadlier than illicit drugs, alcohol and AIDS combined—yet they freely gave up cigarettes because of vaping. Indeed, smoking rates are lower than they've ever been. It's one of the greatest public health victories in history, and it happened almost by accident. [2]

The research, years of epidemiological studies and clinical trials, help explain what happened here, why vaping has been so effective. For example, one 2024 New England Journal of Medicine study demonstrated that adding e-cigarettes to standard counseling more than doubled tobacco abstinence rates at six months compared with counseling alone. 

A separate 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of multiple randomized trials reached a similar conclusion: nicotine e-cigarettes significantly outperform traditional nicotine-replacement therapies for helping people stop smoking. There are at least 100 additional studies involving more than 30,000 people validating that result: "There is high‐certainty evidence that nicotine [vapes] increase quit rates compared to [nicotine replacement therapy]," the Cochrane Collaboration reported in November 2025.

Conclusion

As we observe World No Tobacco Day, this evidence underscores a powerful truth: pragmatic harm-reduction tools can serve as a critical bridge for deeply addicted smokers, driving down smoking rates in ways few experts predicted even a decade ago. While the ultimate goal remains complete nicotine cessation—or never using it in the first place—vaping and other smoke-free products have already saved countless lives and lungs along the way.

That's the story everybody needs to hear today.

[1] Youth vaping recently hit a record low, per the FDA.

[2] We know from retail data that declines in cigarettes sales mirror increases in vape purchases, while taxes on vaping products tend to reverse that trend. Vaping is driving the smoking decline, in other words.