The latest example is from the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) in the United States. The 2025 results, released on March 4, show that youth use of tobacco and nicotine products continues to decline.

Overall tobacco use among middle and high school students fell again in 2025, dropping from 8.1 percent in 2024 to 7.5 percent. Youth vaping declined for the third consecutive year, plummeting to 5.2 percent, the lowest level in a decade. Other nicotine products show similar trends; nicotine pouch use edged down slightly from 1.8 percent to 1.7 percent. Cigarette smoking remained extremely low and unchanged, at just 1.4 percent.

If we look beyond experimentation and focus on regular use, the numbers become even more striking. Daily or near-daily use is rare across all products. Among high school students, only 2.09 percent report regular nicotine vaping, 0.39 percent report regular nicotine pouch use, and just 0.23 percent report smoking cigarettes regularly. Across middle and high school students combined, daily smoking sits at 0.22 percent.

In other words, cigarette smoking among young people in the United States has all but disappeared.

Despite the encouraging data, there was no major press release. Compare that lack of fanfare to the years when youth vaping was on the rise.

Despite the encouraging data, there was no major press release highlighting the findings from the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agencies that produce the NYTS.

Compare that lack of fanfare to the years when US youth vaping, which peaked in 2019, was on the rise. The outcry then was relentless—even though youth smoking, the real health threat, not only continued to decline during this period but was found by some researchers to be declining faster than before.

Despite what’s happening in the real world, influential public health bodies continue to repeat claims about a “gateway” from vaping into smoking.

The World Health Organization still warns of “children and adolescents going on to use smoked products following experimentation with [vapes].” The CDC’s website continues to tell the public that “youth who vape may also be more likely to smoke cigarettes in the future,” as do other public health organizations.

These statements are presented as though they reflect established causal evidence. But they do not.

Most research cited in support of the gateway theory relies on observational studies showing that young people who try vaping are statistically more likely to report later smoking. This is a classic example of correlation being mistaken for causation.

If vaping were a “gateway” into smoking, we would expect youth smoking to rise as vaping becomes more common. The opposite has happened.

Young people who experiment with one risky behavior are often more likely to experiment with others. The concept is known as “common liability,” whether it’s a purely a social phenomenon or has a genetic component. A teenager predisposed toward risk-taking might well try alcohol, cannabis, vaping and cigarettes at different times. Observational studies can document this, but cannot easily disentangle the reasons.

What matters most is the population-level trend. If vaping were truly acting as a gateway into smoking, we would expect youth smoking rates to rise as vaping becomes more common. Instead, the opposite has happened almost everywhere.

In the United States, youth smoking has fallen to historically unprecedented levels during the same period that vaping emerged. The latest NYTS data simply extend a pattern that has been visible for more than a decade: Experimentation with new nicotine products may occur, but smoking continues to collapse.

That pattern is difficult to reconcile with the gateway narrative. Indeed, if anything, the data are more consistent with a theory that alternative nicotine products may be diverting young experimenters away from cigarettes.

Yet instead of acknowledging this, many public health authorities continue to frame vaping as a threat to youth smoking prevention, thereby misleading the public.

Recognizing this success requires a willingness to look at the data as they are, rather than as some might wish them to be.

Good public health policy depends on honest communication about evidence. When institutions continue to repeat claims that are not supported by real-world population data, they risk undermining their own credibility.

The latest NYTS results should be cause for cautious optimism, even celebration. Youth smoking is now extraordinarily rare. Regular nicotine use among adolescents is limited. And across most categories, usage is declining.

This represents one of the most significant public health successes of recent decades. But recognizing that success requires a willingness to look at the data as they are, rather than as some might wish them to be.

If public health authorities want to maintain public trust, it is long past time that they updated their messaging. The facts are increasingly clear. Youth smoking is collapsing and the long-predicted vaping “gateway” into smoking remains nowhere to be seen.

Photograph by Matthew MacQuarrie via Unsplash

The post The Youth-Smoking Collapse Nobody Wants to Talk About appeared first on Filter.

The extent of youth vaping has often been exaggerated, and it has never been tenable to argue it’s a problem comparable to millions of smoking-related deaths. Such arguments are nonetheless politically potent.

That’s why it’s so significant that youth vaping in New Zealand, one of the world’s outstanding tobacco harm reduction success stories, has reportedly halved in recent years. It refutes any narrative that broad vape access to help adults switch from cigarettes inevitably means mass youth use.

The Year 10 Snapshot Survey from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH NZ), released in late 2025, involved over 30,000 participants aged 14 and 15. It revealed that “regular” vaping—defined as vaping at least once a month, so not necessarily at a level that might risk dependency—had dropped from 20.2 percent in 2021 to 11.2 percent today.

Daily vaping, meanwhile, fell from 10.1 percent in 2022 to 7.1 percent. And the proportion of teens who have never smoked continues to rise, hitting a record 89.4 percent.

“Policies to regulate vaping only came into place in 2021,” Youdan noted. The survey, he said, shows how impactful those regulations have been.

These findings provide valuable insight on how countries can successfully implement tobacco harm reduction. According to ASH Director Ben Youdan, it all comes down to responsible regulation.

Youdan told Filter it’s important to note that in the early, unregulated days of vaping in New Zealand, the country saw “rapid” uptake of vaping in both adults and youth.

“Policies to regulate vaping only came into place in 2021,” he noted. The survey, he said, shows how impactful those regulations have been.

New Zealand’s balance has involved measures designed to make it harder for youth to vape without unduly obstructing harm reduction. “Harsh penalties for retailers that sell to minors, limiting flavor names [but not the actual range of available flavors] to reduce marketing appeal to kids, and restricting most sales to R18 stores seem to have got the vaping market more under control,” Youdan said.

New Zealand “understood that regulation was the key and developed a pragmatic plan to do that, which included consumers,” Nancy Loucas, executive coordinator of the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA) and a New Zealand resident, told Filter.

Plummeting youth-vaping rates should help protect adult vape access from political opposition going forward. When the country is one of a handful closing in on “smoke-free” status (a smoking rate of under 5 percent), it’s vital to keep that momentum going. Back in 2011/12, New Zealand’s daily smoking rate was 16.4 percent; in 2024/5, it was 6.8 percent.

“Despite claims that vaping leads to youth smoking, we have seen no evidence of this,” Youdan commented. “In fact, the biggest gains in reducing smoking since 2021 have been the younger age groups.” 

Part of this could be down to youth witnessing less smoking among their parents and other adults, he said, and a pertinent counterfactual question is “whether more young people would still smoke, had vaping not contributed to reducing adult tobacco use in NZ.”

“NZ shows it can be done. That pinpricks the campaign of fear-mongering and moral outrage that is being propagated by the quit-or-die crowd.”

New Zealand’s combined record of reducing smoking and reducing youth vaping makes it hard to process how the country was smeared with a “Dirty Ashtray” award, for “being used by tobacco industry interests,” during the World Health Organization’s COP11 tobacco control meeting in November. 

Loucas sees the country’s success—and the threat that poses to WHO narratives—as the very reason for the insulting award. While the WHO backs bans and heavy restrictions on all consumer nicotine products, New Zealand has generally been focused on what works. 

“NZ shows it can be done, near perfectly and successfully,” she said. “That pinpricks the campaign of fear-mongering and moral outrage that is being propagated by the quit-or-die crowd.”

New Zealanders need only look across the Tasman Sea for an example of how different things might have been.

Australia has perhaps the harshest vape restrictions among high-income countries. In 2021, its government made vapes prescription-only—which amounted to virtual prohibition, when many adults had no practical legal access. In 2024, the government stopped requiring prescriptions. But vapes are still only legally available from pharmacies—in a very limited permitted range, at high prices and requiring a pharmacist’s consultation.  

Smoking cessation in New Zealand has dramatically outpaced that in Australia.

“[Our] regulated industry model has also almost entirely avoided the illicit market that plagues our neighbors in Australia and has greatly expanded the harms of smoking and vaping to include significant social costs,” Youdan said, referencing problems such as violence over control of Australia’s unregulated vape market.

Dr. Colin Mendelsohn, who has written for Filter and was the founding chairman of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association charity, told Filter “there is no justification” for Australia not to adopt the New Zealand model, when doing so “would have a huge beneficial effect on public health.”

“Our study in Addiction found that smoking rates have been declining twice as fast in NZ as in Australia,” he said, and the only relevant difference between the countries was higher vaping uptake in New Zealand.

Despite the headline news from the ASH survey, it also revealed that both vaping and smoking remain significantly higher for some groups of young people, and among Māori youth in particular.

Despite the headline news from the ASH survey, it also revealed that both vaping and smoking remain significantly higher for some groups of young people. Among indigenous Māori youth, in particular, daily vaping stands at 16.5 percent (down from 20.9 percent in 2024), and “regular” smoking at 5.2 percent (no significant change since 2024).

Dr. Marewa Glover, a behavioral scientist and tobacco harm reduction advocate who is herself Māori, blames this stalled rate of smoking on disinformation about vaping and nicotine from the New Zealand Labour Party, which lost power in the 2023 election.

“NZ’s incredible success at reducing overall smoking, especially amongst minors, has been spun into a negative by unethical politicians whose sole focus appears to be to discredit the incumbents,” she told Filter.

“The target for their misleading messages are primarily Island peoples—groups with disproportionately lower levels of education and higher rates of smoking,” she continued. “The people most at risk of dying from a smoke-related disease are being sacrificed for the political gain of a few. This is why Māori minors are likely lagging.”

Photograph by TBEC via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0

Both the Centre of Research Excellence: Indigenous Sovereignty & Smoking, which was founded by Dr. Glover, and The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, formerly received grants from Global Action to End Smoking. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.

The post New Zealand Embraces Vapes to Cut Smoking—and Cuts Youth Vaping appeared first on Filter.

NIDA has used the MFS to survey 12th graders since 1975; some may remember it as the National High School Senior Survey. In 1991, the survey was extended to 10th graders and eighth graders. Today, the resulting data are often used to influence public policy, including by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Though the MFS is grant-funded, NIDA indicated during a January 7 briefing that the project hasn’t been affected by recent upheaval in federal funding streams and that researchers don’t anticipate any disruption for 2026.

The new MFS was released in December 2025, and collected 23,726 surveys from 270 public and private schools. The data are interactive and available to the public.

“It is possible that the factors that disrupted and lowered drug use during the pandemic from 2020 to 2021 resulted in permanent change.”

Though the increase was not statistically significant compared to 2024, in 2025 all three grades reached record levels of what the MFS considers “abstention”—no use of alcohol, cannabis, nicotine vapes or cigarettes. Abstention for the past 12 month-period was reported by 50.8 percent of 12th graders, 69.3 percent of 10th graders and 82.3 percent of eighth graders.

In 1975 when the first MFS was conducted, 95 percent of 12th graders had tried either alcohol, cannabis or cigarettes at some point (vapes were added to the MFS in 2017); only 59 percent reported the same in 2025. In 1991 when the MFS added 10th and eighth graders, three out of four eighth graders reported having tried alcohol, cannabis or cigarettes. In 2025, only about one out of four reported the same.

The trajectory of “abstainers” has been of particular interest to MFS researchers in the past couple of years, as the dust settles from the dramatic drop-off in youth substance use that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic.

“It is possible that the factors that disrupted and lowered drug use during the pandemic from 2020 to 2021 resulted in permanent change,” states the 2025 MFS. “[S]ubstance use could have quickly rebounded to pre-pandemic levels when students returned to school buildings in 2022 and afterwards, if pre-pandemic patterns of social interaction and drug use rapidly re-established. The 2025 results indicate that the lowered levels of student abstention after the pandemic onset are lasting and, in fact, continue to drop even further.”

NIDA slide from January 7 briefing

Alcohol remains the most commonly used substance. Cannabis use is about on par with use of nicotine vapes for eighth and 10th graders, with cannabis a little more popular among 12th graders.

Despite a massive media and public policy campaign against the so-called youth vaping epidemic, MFS surveys indicate that nicotine vaping among teens is about half as prevalent as it was before the pandemic.

The highest rates were reported around 2019-2020, when 35.3 percent of 12th graders, 30.7 percent of 10th graders and 16.3 percent of eighth graders answered that they’d used nicotine vapes within the past year. It was always the case that only a fraction of those past-year users vaped daily or frequently, a reality often obscured by media coverage.

By 2025 those past-year estimates had dropped to 20 percent for 12th graders, 14.3 percent for 10th graders and 8.5 percent for eighth graders. Vaping cannabis has also been declining across all three groups since 2020, but not quite as sharply.

The 2025 MFS indicates that nicotine pouches are becoming more popular among teens, but that those increases aren’t statistically significant nor are the pouches being widely used. Past-year use among 12th graders, for example, was 7 percent.

“Nicotine pouches have generated much media attention amid concerns that adolescent use may grow rapidly, often drawing comparisons to the rise of nicotine vaping from 2017 to 2019,” the survey states. “As of 2025, prevalence remains relatively low.”

Heroin and cocaine appear to be on an upward trajectory for all three grades. But while in some cases the increases from 2024 to 2025 are considered statistically significant, this is essentially because the 2024 numbers were so low that any increase looks big when viewed as a percentage. Past-year use of heroin (or at least, what was believed to be heroin) increased from 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent for eighth graders; from 0.1 percent to 0.5 percent for 10th graders; and from 0.2 percent to 0.9 percent for 12th graders. Responses for past-year cocaine use told a similar story, just with slightly higher decimals.

Image (cropped) via Institute of Education Sciences

The post Youth Vaping, Smoking and Drinking at Record Lows, Per Latest NIDA Data appeared first on Filter.

The news story was published in the Guardian at the end of July, bearing the headline, “Third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking, research shows.”

The article concerns a study published in the Tobacco Control journal, which compared smoking prevalence among UK teens (aged 16-17) in three years representing different generations—1974, 1986 and 2018—using data from national surveys.

The study indicated that smoking prevalence fell from 33 percent in 1974 to 25 percent in 1986 and 12 percent in 2018—a year in which 11 percent were meanwhile found to be vaping.

Analyzing risk factors associated with smoking, the University of Michigan researchers used logistic regression models to estimate the likelihood that teens who were vaping in 2018 would go on to smoke.

They wrote that “the average predicted probability of smoking ranged from 1% among e-cigarette naïve youth to 33% among youth currently using e-cigarettes.”

“The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a ‘gateway’ to nicotine cigarettes for children,” the Guardian claimed, “undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.”

Based on this, the Guardian article stated that, “A third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking tobacco, research shows, meaning they are as likely to smoke as their peers were in the 1970s.”

“The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a ‘gateway’ to nicotine cigarettes for children,” the Guardian claimed, “undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.”

Dr. Arielle Selya, a behavioral scientist with a background in adolescent substance use and addiction, took to her blog to critique both the study and the Guardian coverage. She wrote that the wording used by the Guardian, including the headline, “sounds like smoking is an objectively documented outcome, but it’s speculative, uncertain, and probably overestimated.”

“The results don’t support this claim,” Selya told Filter, noting that the study “could have looked at actual smoking behavior in 2018 in relation to e-cigarette use, but didn’t.”

“When they say ‘will go on to smoke,’ this does not refer to actual measured behavior,” she elaborated, “it refers to a hypothetical and indirect estimation of smoking (based on risk factors).”

Selya explained that the study showed that personal and situational risk factors correlated with cigarette smoking since 1974—such as alcohol use, parental smoking and sociodemographics—were more common among youth who vaped in 2018 than among the youth who didn’t.

She suggested that a “neutral” headline would center on how youth who vaped in 2018 were similar to youth who smoked in 1974, in terms of those risk factors.

“This is simply a more accurate description of what the results actually show, without any unjustified inference,” she said.

Instead, the Guardian’s assertion, in both the subtitle of the article and the main text, that the results suggest a “gateway” from youth vaping to smoking is unsupported by the study, Selya said.

“This is confirmation bias at work. I think the authors interpreted ambiguous results in a way that confirms their pre-existing views.”

But that’s a trap the study authors seem to have fallen into as well.

“The academics wrote that although the research did not establish a causal link, their findings were ‘especially concerning,” stated the Guardian, which quoted the authors as claiming: “The success of previous tobacco control efforts and broad shifts in intergenerational risk factors in reducing risk of cigarette smoking may be mitigated when adolescents use e-cigarettes.”

“This is confirmation bias at work,” Selya commented. “I think the authors interpreted ambiguous results in a way that confirms their pre-existing views.”

“They caution against drawing casual conclusions,” she continued, “but then strongly imply them anyway, without even acknowledging alternative explanations, or designing the study in a way that can test their hypothesis against others.”

In her blog, Selya noted further issues including questionable accuracy of the models used to produce estimates of how many vapers would go on to smoke. And she wondered why the researchers would use a “circuitous process” to produce estimates rather than looking at readily available real-world data. “Is this because the rates of estimated smoking are higher than actual smoking?” she asked.

Moreover, using exactly the same results, Selya said, she could make a case for common liability—the idea that certain youth are, for various reasons, predisposed to nicotine use of whatever kind, which would explain correlations between vaping and smoking.

As such, the study’s findings around vaping are a “Rorschach test that can be interpreted in opposite ways,” she wrote.

But the study authors, she said, “infer one specific explanation (that vaping could lead to smoking)” and “don’t mention competing explanations or thoroughly convey how ambiguous the results really are.”

“I think alarmist media articles are responsible for these misconceptions,” Selya told Filter.

Meanwhile, new data from the charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH UK) show that UK adult vaping has very slightly dipped to a rate of 10.4 percent, while smoking has stayed at 13 percent. (Fifty-five percent of adults who vape formerly smoked, while 40 percent are dual users.)

Among youth, 20 percent of those aged 11-17 have ever vaped, and 7 percent currently vape (only 40 percent of whom vape daily)—rates that have stayed the same. But 21 percent have ever smoked—troublingly up from 14 percent in 2023.

Youth who had tried both cigarettes and vapes were more likely to have tried cigarettes first, ASH found.

A deeply concerning finding was that 56 percent of adults who smoke now wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as smoking or worse—up from 43 percent in 2023. Youth aged 11-17 are even more misinformed, with 63 percent—up from 54 percent in 2023—now believing vapes are at least as bad for you as cigarettes.

“I think alarmist media articles are responsible for these misconceptions,” Selya told Filter. She cited another recent study that found many young adult vapers in the United States have switched to smoking—with 44 percent of them believing smoking to be “healthier.”

Photograph (cropped) by Jonathan Billinger via Geograph/Creative Commons 2.0

Dr. Selya is an employee of Pinney Associates, Inc. which consults to Juul Labs on tobacco harm minimization. She also individually provides consulting services on behavioral science to the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR) through ECLAT Srl, which received funding from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (now Global Action to End Smoking), and serves as a scientific advisor to the Global Forum on Nicotine (GFN) in exchange for travel support to the annual GFN conference and a small honorarium. Her commentary in this article is her own and these funders had no involvement. The Influence Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Filter, has received unrestricted grants from Juul Labs, Inc (previously) and donations and travel support from the GFN organizers. Joe Gitchell, the CEO of Pinney Associates, has made personal donations to The Influence Foundation. Filter’s Editorial Independence Policy applies.

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