Smoking could be history

Smoking can become a thing of the past if the quality and diversity of vaping products continue to increase and costs continue to fall, according to an Indianexpress.com story citing a recent study.

‘If product quality and diversity continue to increase, and costs continue to fall, within 20 years vaping could cut smoking rates by 50 percent or more,’ says a working paper by Reason Foundation, a US-based non-profit organization. ‘In 30 years, vaping might eliminate smoking altogether.’

A co-author of the paper Amir Ullah Khan, member of the board of governors at the Presidency University, Bangalore, India, said that in less than 10 years vape products had seen a dramatic increase in quality, efficacy and safely, while prices had fallen. “Already, millions of smokers have switched,” he said.

The authors estimated that in India ‘within a few years perhaps 10 percent of smokers could switch to vaping’. If that happened, close to 11 million people would experience a multitude of benefits, including a substantial reduction in the risk of death from tobacco-related diseases.’

‘Assuming that the majority of those who switch are under 40, the average increase in life expectancy could be around eight years, resulting in a total saving of around 90 million life-years,’ the paper said.

Despite this potential, some countries had introduced excessive regulations and even bans on such products. If widely adopted, excessively restrictive regulation of vape products would drive up costs, reduce choice, and undermine competition and innovation, the researchers noted.

In India, several states had already imposed bans on the sale of vape products – effectively denying smokers a life-saving technology, they added.