Newly published 2010 survey found 1.8% of US adults had ever used an e-cigarette

[Bill Godshall]

A newly published 2010 survey found that 5.1% of adults in US have ever tried snus, 1.8% had tried e-cigarettes, and .6% had tried dissolvable tobacco products. And smokers were far more likely than never smokers to indicate use of these new far less hazardous alternatives to cigarettes.
http://www.hindawi.com:80/journals/jeph/2012/989474/
Use of Emerging Tobacco Products in the United States : Table 2

Unfortunately, the authors (including e-cigarette/snus/dissolvable prohibitionist Jonathan Winickoff) failed to acknowledge the exponentially lower disease risks of these products or any health benefits accrued by smokers who substitute them for cigarettes. Instead, they call for more unwarranted restrictions on their marketing, sale and use.

Table 2 (link above) provides details of the survey findings. The rest of the paper is just propaganda against tobacco harm reduction products and policies. Don't know why the authors included water pipe in the survey (since its not a harm reduction product, nor is it marketed as such).

 

[Bill Godshall]

Since there were 237.4 million Americans 18 or older in 2011, the survey found that about 4.27 million US adults had ever used an e-cigarette.

That's consistent with two other survey findings. But the number of e-cigarette consumers is now higher.

 

[Petrodus]

I wonder what percent of smokers have tried an e-cigarette

 

[Vocalek]

I have to wonder how many of the Former Smokers (1.5%) used to be smokers until they took up use of an e-cigarette.

I also have to wonder how many of the Non-Daily Smokers (8.2%) used to be daily smokers until they took up use of an e-cigarette.

It doesn't seem as if they asked anything at all about the effect of using an "emerging tobacco product" on smoking habits.


Just looked at the article again and see that they actually cited this as a limitation of their study.

The fourth limitation relates to whether any of the recent former smokers had quit cigarettes because of these emerging tobacco products, or, rather, had used these products after successfully quitting. Obviously those former smokers who quit before these products emerged in the US market did not use these products as a cessation strategy, but this is an area for future study among people who have recently quit smoking.

It certainly is.