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Vaping in Italy: youth on alert

Vaping in Italy: youth on alert

I tried smoking for a month at twenty, just to see what the fuss was about: it never grew on me, thankfully, and I went right back to being who I was before. I was born in the seventies, when secondhand smoke was everywhere, at home, in bars, even on public transport, where lighting up was treated as perfectly normal. That is probably where my aversion to the whole thing comes from, vaping included: every time I see someone vaping with a relaxed look on their face, filling the air with watermelon or icy mint, I wonder what exactly they find so enjoyable about it. I do not get it, and I probably never will. But the numbers on vaping in Italy are getting hard to ignore, especially among the very young, so I decided to see what the data actually says.

How many Italians vape, broken down by age

Every year, around World No Tobacco Day, Italy’s National Institute of Health (ISS) publishes an updated snapshot of nicotine use across the country. The latest one, released in late May 2026, tells the story of a shift rather than a victory over smoking.

Among adults (18-69), comparing 2008 with 2025 shows a clear drop in traditional cigarettes smoked exclusively: from 30% to 18%. Overall nicotine consumption, though, fell much less, from 30% to 27%, a sign that part of those who quit the classic pack switched to something else. Among women the picture looks similar: traditional cigarettes drop from 25% to 15%, while overall nicotine use still sits at 23%. Among young adults the substitution is even sharper: in the 18-24 bracket, traditional cigarettes collapse from 34% to 14%, while overall nicotine consumption stops at 31%; between 25 and 34, the figure goes from 37% to 20% for classic tobacco, against 34% for total nicotine use.

The alarm among teenagers and pre-teens

This is where the numbers stop being a market statistic and become a public health concern. Among 14 to 17 year olds, 37.1% of Italian students (roughly 850,000 kids) used a nicotine product in the past month; 30.8% had vaped. The gender gap is striking: girls lead the ranking, at 44.2% against 30.3% of their male peers.

Even among 11 to 13 year olds, an age when none of this should even cross a child’s mind, 5.9% of them (about 93,000) consumed tobacco or nicotine in the past month, with 5.2% already having tried an e-cigarette. More than half of the consumers in this bracket, 51.4%, practice poly-use: switching between e-cigs, ordinary cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches, often without realizing how much they are actually taking in. Nicotine pouches specifically have already been tried by 9.1% of teenagers in 2026, up from 8.2% in 2025 and 3.8% in 2024, a fast climb that pediatricians and smoking-cessation centers are struggling to keep up with, not helped by the drop in active centers nationwide, down from 223 to 209 in a single year.

The boom of specialty shops

Behind these numbers sits an industry that consolidated fast in Italy. The vaping market is worth around 800 million euros today, having grown 29% between 2022 and 2023, with double-digit expansion projected for the rest of the decade. Authorized retailers numbered nearly 3,000 by the end of 2024, with 350 new openings in the last year on record, a pace reminiscent of other sectors that started as a niche and quickly turned into a common sight on the high street, fairly evenly spread across the country with a slight concentration in the North and Center.

The rules changed too, starting in 2025: online sales of nicotine liquids have been banned since January 1st, and a new excise duty on those same liquids took effect in February. The paradoxical result is that anyone wanting to buy a nicotine liquid now has to walk into a physical shop, which probably helps explain why neighborhood stores, far from disappearing, keep opening. Average monthly spending for someone who vapes hovers around 40 euros, ranging between 30 and 80, and has stayed fairly stable despite the tax hikes.

Is it really less harmful than smoking?

The honest answer here is: it depends what you measure and over what time frame. The most recent Cochrane review on e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation tool, led by Nicola Lindson and colleagues, confirms that nicotine e-cigarettes help more than traditional replacement therapy (patches, gum) in getting people to quit combustible cigarettes, with the certainty of evidence for that specific comparison rated as high. Put another way, someone who already smokes and switches entirely to vaping reduces their exposure to many of the toxic substances produced by burning tobacco.

The trouble is that this logic only holds for an adult smoker replacing one habit with a less risky one, not for a teenager who had not started smoking traditional cigarettes yet. In that case the e-cigarette does not reduce anything: it introduces nicotine, a substance that creates dependence and that, in a brain still under construction, affects attention span and impulse control, in someone who otherwise probably would not have smoked at all.

What the studies say about lungs and long-term risk

Long-term risk is still being studied, and caution is warranted here. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted on mice exposed for twelve weeks to e-cigarette vapor (equivalent, according to the researchers, to ten years of light use in a human), found DNA damage in the lungs, bladder and heart, along with inhibited genetic repair mechanisms. The study also drew sharp criticism from parts of the scientific community, who argued the doses given to the animals were disproportionate to real-world use, and some experts estimated that e-cigarette vapor carries, at worst, about 5% of the risk of conventional smoking.

On the so-called popcorn lung, the respiratory condition historically linked to diacetyl used in certain food flavorings, European consumer associations have repeatedly clarified that there are no documented cases tied directly to e-cigarettes sold within the EU, where diacetyl is banned from vaping liquids anyway. What remains well documented, and here the scientific community agrees, is that the aerosol produced by e-cigarettes is not harmless: it contains ultrafine particles, trace heavy metals and substances that irritate the airways, in amounts clearly lower than those from a lit cigarette.

How France, the UK and the US compare

The rest of Europe and the United States are moving along different lines. France approved a ban on disposable e-cigarettes, the so-called “puffs,” in February 2025, prompted by a figure that alarmed the health ministry: 15% of French teenagers aged 13 to 16 had already tried one, often starting at 11 or 12. The UK followed a similar path, banning the sale of disposable devices both online and in stores from June 1st, 2025, after Belgium and France, mainly for environmental reasons tied to lithium battery disposal: in the UK alone, around five million were thrown away every week. Among young Britons, according to the annual tracking survey by ASH, 20% of 11 to 17 year olds have already tried an e-cigarette and 7% currently use one, with prevalence rising sharply with age, from 5% among 11 to 15 year olds to 12% among 16 and 17 year olds.

In the United States, where the phenomenon exploded earlier than anywhere else, 2024 figures show a decline from the 2019 peaks: about 1.63 million middle and high school students, 5.9% of the total, report current use, with a clear preference for flavored disposable devices. The direction, in short, is shared across all these countries: more restrictions on disposable products and flavors, more attention on the teenage bracket, while Italy has so far relied on taxation and closing the online channel as its first line of defense.

Where vaping is (and is not) allowed

There is also a fairly common misconception among vapers: assuming that, since there is no combustion and no smoke in the strict sense, e-cigarettes automatically fall outside the bans designed for traditional ones. Reality is more complicated. The 2003 Sirchia law, which bans smoking in enclosed public spaces, explicitly refers to burning tobacco and does not mention e-cigarettes, so nationally there is no single rule that treats the two the same way. That does not mean anything goes: a 2013 decree bans vaping inside schools, universities, training centers and healthcare facilities, while bars, restaurants, offices and public transport can choose on their own to extend the ban, and in practice many of them do, signage at the entrance included. Anyone who feels free to vape anywhere because “it’s just vapor” still risks a fine whenever the venue or employer has decided to treat e-cigarettes the same as traditional ones, a choice that has become fairly common in everyday practice.

Why I do not get the appeal of a drag

Confession: having gone through all these numbers, I am left with my original question still standing. The month I spent smoking at twenty was enough to rule out anything magical about the gesture, and the years of secondhand smoke I breathed as a child certainly did not help me warm up to it later. I get the harm-reduction argument for people who have smoked for years and cannot quit: there, e-cigarettes can be a useful tool, backed by fairly solid scientific literature. What still escapes me is the idea that introducing nicotine into a body that never needed it can be marketed, to fourteen-year-olds with their backpacks still on, as something light, almost harmless, flavored like candy. There is nothing relaxing about a dependency that starts before the age of fifteen, however colorful the packaging.

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Chiara Bonifazi