Cigarettes Are More Popular With Americans Than Vaping

Despite the widespread drop in smoking over the past decades, cigarettes are still more popular than vaping.

In a new Gallup poll, roughly 11 percent of Americans said they smoked a cigarette in the past week, compared with 7 percent who said the same for electronic cigarettes.

Overall, traditional cigarette smoking remains at roughly an 80-year low. In 2022, cigarette smoking reached a record low of 11 percent and has stayed around that level ever since.

When Gallup began looking at smoking, in 1944, 41 percent of American adults said they smoked. Even a decade ago, cigarette smoking was at roughly two times the rate seen today.

Young adults have led the charge in the reduced smoking rate, with only an average of 6 percent of adults under 30 smoking. That was 35 percent back in 2003.

While cigarette use is on the decline for young adults, they are the most likely to vape. Since 2019, the number of adults vaping has remained somewhere between 6 and 8 percent. For young adults, 18 percent vape, while just 1 percent of those 65 and older do.

Despite this, cigarettes remain more popular than e-cigarettes, a sign of the stubborn persistence of traditional tobacco products.

Smoking has long been correlated with education, with those more educated less likely to pick up a cigarette. Only 5 percent of college graduates smoked within the past week, according to the poll, compared with 15 percent of those without a college degree.

E-cigarettes are generally seen as safer by U.S. adults. While 79 percent of Americans believe cigarettes are “very harmful,” 57 percent said the same about e-cigarettes.

While traditional cigarettes have long been linked with adverse health outcomes, including cancer, e-cigarettes also contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance. The aerosol in e-cigs also contains chemicals linked to cancer.

E-cigarettes were originally touted as a preferable alternative to traditional smoking and its more substantial health effects. But experts have long warned that many dangers lurk behind seemingly harmless vaping.

Particularly for teenage and young adult Americans, choosing to vape without ever having smoked a traditional cigarette can be a dangerous activity.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has said vaping “could be a major form of harm reduction for adults” but warned the practice was “not zero risk.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 10 percent of high school students vaped in 2023. This makes vaping an especially risky choice for young Americans who were previously not addicted to nicotine.

“Vaping nicotine and/or marijuana is incredibly dangerous as the pods contain very large concentrations of these substances, which make using them in this manner much more addictive than alternative methods of administration,” Barrye Price, CEO of Community Anti-Drug Coalitions, told Psychology Today.