{"id":160795,"date":"2025-11-30T06:31:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T06:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/160795\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T06:31:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T06:31:11","slug":"not-as-cool-as-it-used-to-be-youth-vaping-rate-plummets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/160795\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Not as cool as it used to be’: Youth vaping rate plummets"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Pretoria Gordon of RNZ<\/a><\/p>\n

A survey of more than 30,000 of New Zealand’s Year 10 students has indicated that the perception of vaping is changing.<\/p>\n

The number of teenagers who vaped regularly – once a month or more – had tripled between 2019 and 2021, peaking at 20.2 percent.<\/p>\n

But the latest Action on Smoking and Health survey has found that number has halved since then.<\/p>\n

“Vaping is not as cool as it used to be,” chairperson Emeritus Professor Robert Beaglehole told RNZ.<\/p>\n

The number of teenagers who vape on a daily basis has also dropped to 7.1 percent, down from “peak vape” of 10.1 percent in 2022.<\/p>\n

Fewer than a third had ever tried vaping too, Beaglehole said, “which is great news”.<\/p>\n

He believed regulation had also made an impact – vaping products were widely available for teenagers until 2020, when the government banned the sale to those under 18 – but feared that overregulation could push people back to smoking.<\/p>\n

“Vaping helps adult smokers quit and is much, much less harmful than smoking.”<\/p>\n

Beaglehole said the country was raising a smoke-free generation, with a “negligible” number – about 1 percent – of young people smoking on a daily basis since 2021.<\/p>\n

“This is a major global success which we should be celebrating … we are leading the way.<\/p>\n

“Youth smoking has almost disappeared, and vaping continues to fall.”<\/p>\n

However, Otago University associate professor Andrew Waa feared teenagers had switched to\u00a0oral nicotine products\u00a0instead.<\/p>\n

“Rather than talking about a smokefree future, we need to start thinking about a nicotine-free future for our young people,” he said.<\/p>\n

Beaglehole has also called for more to be done to address the vaping rates for rangatahi M\u0101ori.<\/p>\n

The last year had seen a significant decrease, he said, but 16.5 percent of M\u0101ori teenagers still vaped on a daily basis.<\/p>\n

Waa said vaping products were too accessible for young M\u0101ori and Pacific – and the rates were “an entirely preventable inequity”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Pretoria Gordon of RNZ A survey of more than 30,000 of New Zealand’s Year 10 students has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-160795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}