For more than a decade, one of the most persistent claims in the tobacco control echo chamber has been that nicotine vapes act as a “gateway” to smoking for young people. But the gap between the claim and the observable reality keeps growing wider.
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