According to the OFDT, the French continue to buy ever fewer cigarettes. Sales of smoking cessation treatments are also falling. Only vapers are more and more numerous.
Could the e-cigarette be shaking up the smoking cessation market? In any case, this is what the latest figures from the French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) made public this Friday suggest. In its latest monthly tobacco dashboard (data from February 2014), the OFDT indicates that cigarette sales fell 7.6% in February 2014 compared to the same month last year. The Office also specifies that apart from during the months of October and December 2013, “they have been decreasing in France since March 2012.”
Champix sales fell 40% in one year
And this drop affects all tobacco products. Because for roll-your-own tobacco, February 2014 corresponds to the fourth consecutive month of decline in sales (-3.5%, for an equivalent number of days of delivery) whereas they tended to increase in 2013.
In the same trend, sales of treatments for stopping smoking also fell, in one year, by 34.5%, and patches are the most affected (- 52%). But the drop also concerns sales of oral forms of smoking cessation treatments, which are dropping considerably. As proof, sales of the drugs Champix and Zyban fell respectively by -38.8% and -23.6%.
1 million French people are regular vapers
Finally, the tobacco consultations received fewer new patients (-6.7%). At the same time, the level of calls to Tabac info service increased further (+1.2), especially those managed by tobacco specialists (+ 14.5%).
Faced with these figures, it is clear that the number of vapers is increasing month by month.
Indeed, the Eurobarometer of May 2012 estimated at 500,000 the number of regular “vapers” in France. Today, the French Office for the Prevention of Smoking (OFT) estimates that at the end of 2013, this figure had already doubled, with one million French people who are now regular vapers.
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