Ask someone whether a vape or a cigarette does more damage, and there's now a decent chance they'll get it backwards. New analysis from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) found that 52% of UK smokers believe vaping is at least as harmful as smoking tobacco. Among smokers who've never actually tried vaping, that rises to 61%. A decade ago, only around a quarter of UK adults thought the same. Somewhere along the way the message got scrambled, and it's worth working out why, because the mix-up has real consequences for people trying to cut down or quit.
What ASH actually found
The figures come from ASH's 2026 Smokefree GB survey, carried out with YouGov across more than 13,000 UK adults. Here's the headline breakdown:
- 52% of current smokers think vaping is as harmful as, or more harmful than, smoking
- That climbs to 61% among smokers who have never tried an e-cigarette themselves
- Across all UK adults, 54% hold the same mistaken view
- Ten years ago, roughly a quarter of UK adults thought vaping was as risky as smoking
ASH's chief executive, Hazel Cheeseman, has described the gap between public perception and the actual evidence as worrying, and it's not hard to see why once you look at where those numbers have travelled from.
This isn't a one-off result
A separate, longer-running study backs it up. Researchers at UCL, funded by Cancer Research UK, tracked more than 28,000 smokers in England between 2014 and 2023 and found the same steady drift. By 2023, 57% believed e-cigarettes were equally or more harmful than cigarettes, up sharply from a decade earlier. The study's authors pointed to heavy media coverage of youth vaping and isolated safety scares as part of the problem. That kind of coverage tends to get far more attention than the roughly 75,000 smoking related deaths recorded in England every year, which barely make the news at all simply because they're so routine.
So what does the evidence actually say
None of this is about telling anyone what to do. It's just what the UK's own health bodies have concluded, repeatedly, over the last decade:
- The NHS is direct about it: e-cigarettes don't burn tobacco, so they don't produce tar or carbon monoxide, two of the most damaging substances in cigarette smoke
- A landmark 2015 review by Public Health England put the difference at around 95% less harmful than smoking, a figure broadly upheld by every major evidence review since
- A November 2025 Cochrane review, generally treated as the gold standard for evidence synthesis, rated nicotine vaping as more effective than patches or gum for helping people quit, with high certainty evidence
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, England's Chief Medical Officer, summed up the official line about as clearly as it gets: "if you smoke, vaping is much safer; if you don't smoke, don't vape." That second half matters just as much as the first. Vaping isn't risk free, and none of this is an argument for anyone who doesn't already smoke to start.
Why the mix-up matters
ASH's data points to a real world knock-on effect. Among people who said they'd quit vaping altogether, nearly a fifth did it by switching to cigarettes rather than stopping nicotine completely. That's the outcome harm reduction experts worry about most: someone moving from a lower risk product back to the one that does the most damage, partly because they'd been led to believe there was no real difference between the two in the first place.
If you already smoke and you're weighing up the switch
This is where it gets practical rather than theoretical. If you're already a smoker and curious about what vaping actually involves, the mechanics are straightforward. Instead of burning tobacco, a vape heats an e-liquid, usually a mix of propylene glycol, vegetable glycerine, flavouring and nicotine, into a vapour you inhale. No combustion means none of the tar and none of the carbon monoxide that comes from an actual burning cigarette.
Our nic products range covers the basics.
Lost Mary BM6000 New Edition is a rechargeable, TPD compliant pod kit built for people coming from disposables or cigarettes rather than committed hobby vapers. It uses a mouth to lung draw designed to feel closer to an actual cigarette pull, holds a 2ml prefilled pod plus a 10ml refill container for around 6,000 puffs in total, and charges over USB-C rather than getting binned after one use.
If you'd rather build your own kit, Elfliq 20mg is a nic salt e-liquid in a 10ml bottle, blended 50/50 VG/PG for a smoother throat hit than a standard freebase liquid at the same strength. It's also stocked in lower strengths, so there's room to move down over time if that's the plan.
A quick care note
Keep e-liquid bottles somewhere cool and out of direct sunlight. Heat and UV break down flavourings and nicotine salts faster than you'd think, and a liquid that's gone off will taste noticeably flat. When a device battery finally dies, don't bin it. Vape batteries go in WEEE recycling points, the same as any other lithium battery, and most local recycling centres and some retailers will take them off your hands.
None of this is medical advice, and vaping isn't something anyone should take up cold. But if you already smoke, and the only thing putting you off trying something else is a stat that turns out to be wrong, that's worth knowing. For questions on delivery, discretion or age verification, our FAQ covers the basics.