ANN ARBOR (WWJ) - The number of youth in the U.S. who try and fail to quit e-cigarettes has increased, reversing 17 years of progress against battling teen nicotine addiction, a new study revealed.
The study from the University of Michigan also showed that the number of adolescents using e-cigarettes also also rapidly increased in the last five years, while traditional cigarette use dropped.
According to the findings, 6% of teens surveyed said they tried to quit cigarettes or e-cigarettes and failed in 2020. In comparison, only 4% of adolescents reported failed attempts to quit cigarettes in 2009, noting that e-cigarettes were new the market and cigarettes were the primary source of nicotine.
The report showed that overall, teen cigarette use had gone down significantly. The study said 10% of teens from 1997 failed to quit smoking cigarettes, a number that dropped over two decades to 2% in 2020.
E-cigarettes have now becoming the primary source of nicotine for teens battling addiction, the study suggests.
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"These results indicate that failed nicotine quit attempt levels have gone back to where they were about 17 years ago for adolescents," said Richard Miech, research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Tobacco control efforts are largely responsible for the two-decade decline in failed nicotine quit attempts, which was brought about by a marked decline in adolescent cigarette use since 2000," Miech said. "Unfortunately, the recent rise in adolescent e-cigarette use, and growing numbers of adolescents who try to quit e-cigarettes and fail, have eroded much of this decline in adolescents who struggle with nicotine."
The data was collected by U-M's Monitoring the Future, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the project conducts annual surveys of eighth, 10th and 12th grade students across the nation.
This particular study polled over 800,000 students from 1997 until 2020.
The survey asked students who have ever smoked a cigarette, "Have you ever tried to stop smoking cigarettes and found that you could not?" In 2020, the study added a new question, asking students who vape e-cigarettes: "Have you ever tried to stop vaping nicotine and found that you could not?"
Students could respond either "yes" and "no."
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