NEW YORK - When Marty Weinstein decided to quit smoking, he took a friend’s advice and tried electronic cigarettes rather than government-approved nicotine replacement products.
Weinstein, 58, has gone from a pack a day nine months ago to the equivalent in nicotine of four or five cigarettes. The e-cigs have a familiar look and feel, and quench his desire to hold on to a cigarette and puff.
“I fully understand I’m still addicted to nicotine,” said Weinstein, a Connecticut taxi driver who had smoked for more than 20 years. “But I’m now so much healthier.”
E-cigarettes, metal tubes that heat liquids typically laced with nicotine and deliver vapour when sucked, are transforming the market for smoking cessation products and slowing the $2.4 billion (about R28bn) in global sales of long-standing aids such as nicotine patches and gums. But their impact on health remains unclear, experts say, raising difficult questions for regulators who are starting to impose limits on e-cigarette use.
E-cigarette makers in the US are barred from explicitly marketing the products as smoking cessation devices, but have found ways to appeal legally to smokers who are thinking of quitting.
“You never say ‘quit’ because it’s not approved by the FDA as a smoking cessation device,” said Jose Castro, the chief executive of A1 Vapors in Miami, referring to the US Food and Drug Administration.
A1 Vapors runs an ad on its website urging customers to “kiss tobacco goodbye” and give themselves the “gift of your life. Literally”, adding a disclaimer that e-cigs are not a smoking cessation product.
E-cigarettes, or e-cigs, have only come into widespread use in the past few years, but have already made inroads into traditional quitting therapies.
About a third of British smokers trying to quit were using e-cigarettes, according to a University College London survey in January of 1 800 people, including 450 smokers.
E-cigs are used by almost twice as many people as government-approved nicotine gums, lozenges and patches, according to the survey. That was a reversal from 2011, when only about 5 percent of people were using e-cigarettes and more than 30 percent used over-the-counter products.
Similar data is not yet publicly available for the US.
Worldwide sales of all nicotine replacement therapies grew just 1.2 percent last year, to almost $2.4bn, according to data from commercial researcher Euromonitor. US sales, at $900 million, grew 0.2 percent, and are expected by Euromonitor to drop this year by that amount.
Big tobacco companies like Altria, Lorillard and Reynolds American have rushed into the e-cig market. The entire US market for “vapour devices” such as e-cigs grew last year by 40-50 percent to between $2.5bn and $3bn, Euromonitor said. The global market is worth $5bn.
Mark Strobel, a consumer health analyst at Euromonitor, said e-cigarettes have slowed nicotine replacement therapy sales, along with relatively high prices and a shrinking population of smokers, especially in the US.
“For some consumers it has been a direct substitution.”
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Johnson & Johnson don’t break out the data on their smoking cessation products, which are relatively small parts of their sales, but the companies have noted the change.
“It’s definitely taken a bit of our market, no question at all – but there’s a lot of competition in that space,” GSK chief executive Andrew Witty said.
GSK’s nicotine replacement therapies and smoking cessation products include the brands Nicorette, NicoDermCQ and the medicine Zyban. There is little long-term safety data on e-cigarettes, although some health-care professionals say they may be better for consumers than tobacco cigarettes because they have no carbon monoxide and fewer cancer-causing chemicals.
Reuters