Homeless people offered free e-cigarettes in trial in UK

The trial was jointly launched by a number of well-known universities in England, Scotland and Wales, including University College London, King's College London, University of Edinburgh, University of East Anglia, etc. In the process, 240 homeless people received vaping kits worth £25, while a control group, another 240 people, received other smoking cessation services provided by smoking cessation groups.

In the UK, the homeless population has always been the hardest hit area for tobacco control. Caitlin Notley, a professor at the University of East Anglia School of Medicine, said the average UK population smoking rate was 14.1%, but among the homeless population, the rate was as high as 70%.

"Disposable vapes are the most effective way to quit smoking, and many studies have found that e-cigarettes are more effective than nicotine patches or chewing gum, and are far less harmful to the human body than cigarettes," Caitlin Notley said. Disposable vapes are an attractive option for people who drop their cigarettes."

Funding for the trial will be provided by the UK's National Institutes of Health. The research team proposed that if free e-cigarettes can help these users quit smoking better than the two smoking cessation services, then in the future, homeless help centers can use this method on a large scale to reduce the probability of such people getting sick from smoking. 

This is not the first attempt in the UK to launch a national smoking cessation service through e-cigarettes. In 2021, relevant university scholars will jointly launch a small-scale experiment. At that time, the research team distributed free e-cigarettes to 48 homeless people in four homeless help centers in the UK, and provided traditional smoking cessation services to 32 people.

After 4 weeks of follow-up, the research team found that homeless people who had access to e-cigarettes showed higher quit success rates. The research was published in the UK's National Institutes of Health research journal in May last year.

Smoking is one of the biggest public health problems in the UK. According to the UK government, around 78,000 people die from cigarettes every year, and many more suffer from related diseases. In order to reduce the smoking rate and improve national health, the United Kingdom has set the goal of becoming a "smoke-free country" by 2030, and electronic cigarettes have become one of the important tools to achieve this goal.

Disposable vapes have also become the first choice for people who want to quit smoking in the UK. According to data from the UK Smoking Cessation Service, between 2019 and 2020, those who used e-cigarettes to quit smoking in local smoking cessation services had a smoking cessation success rate of 59.7 to 74%. between.