For a few years there, you could not move for headlines about teenagers and vapes. The thing was everywhere, and so was the panic. Then something happened that got a lot less coverage: the numbers started going down, and they have kept going down. Here is what the latest New Zealand data actually says, and what it does not.
The Headline Number, and Why It Is Good News
Regular Vaping Has Dropped Again
Here is the number worth knowing: in 2025, 11.2 percent of Year 10 students reported vaping regularly, which means at least once a month. That is down from 14.1 percent the year before, and a long way down from 20.2 percent in 2021. Two years of falling in a row is not a blip. It is a trend.
The figure comes from the ASH Year 10 Snapshot Survey, which asks around 31,000 fourteen and fifteen year olds the same questions every year. It is one of the largest surveys of its kind anywhere, which is part of why it is worth paying attention to. A small poll can be noise. Thirty-one thousand students, year after year, is signal.
So if the story you have heard is that every teenager in the country is glued to a vape, the data does not back that up. The peak has passed, and the line is heading the right way.
Daily Vaping Is Falling Too
Regular and daily are not the same thing, and the gap matters. Vaping once a month is different from reaching for it before you have got out of bed. The daily figure, the one that tracks genuine habit, sat at 7.1 percent in 2025. At the 2022 peak it was around 10.1 percent.
That drop is the part worth sitting with. Daily use is the closest thing the survey has to a measure of dependence, because doing something every day is what addiction looks like in practice. Fewer young people crossing that line is the outcome that actually changes lives down the track.
It is also a reminder that the headlines about vaping have always run a bit ahead of the evidence. The thing was rising fast for a few years, everyone noticed, and the panic kept going even after the numbers started turning. Worth keeping in mind the next time a stat gets thrown at you.
What the Numbers Do Not Tell You
An Average Hides a Lot
A single national figure is tidy, and tidy can mislead. The 11 percent average is made up of schools, regions and groups where the real number is much higher or much lower. The survey is clear that the decline has not been even.
Daily vaping among Maori students fell from 20.9 percent in 2024 to 16.5 percent in 2025, which is a meaningful drop in one year. But it still sits well above the national average, and the same pattern shows up for Pacific students. The gap is real and the data names it plainly.
We are not going to pretend to speak for anyone here, and the reasons behind those differences are bigger than a vape stat. The honest thing is just to say the average is not the whole picture. If you only ever look at the headline number, you miss the part of the story that matters most.
A Number Is Not a Verdict on You
There is a trap in survey data, and it is worth naming. A statistic describes a population, not a person. If you vape, the fact that you are now in a shrinking minority does not make you a statistic, a problem, or a cautionary tale. It just means the crowd has thinned out.
The flip side is also true. If you have never touched one, the falling numbers do not mean you dodged something everyone else got caught by. Plenty of people never started, and that has been true the whole time.
Numbers are useful for spotting trends and arguing about policy. They are close to useless for telling any individual what to do. Your own choices are yours, and the survey has nothing to say about them. It just counts.
Why the Trend Turned
Rules, Supply and Plain Boredom
Nobody can hand you a single clean reason the line turned, and anyone who claims to is guessing. A few things happened around the same time. Rules tightened on where vapes could be sold and how they could be marketed, and the cheap disposable kind got harder to grab on a whim. Supply matters. So does friction.
There is also the boredom factor, which gets underrated. Vaping arrived as the new thing, and new things have a shelf life. Once something stops being novel and starts being the thing your slightly embarrassing older cousin does, the shine comes off fast for teenagers.
The honest position is that it was probably all of the above, in proportions nobody can pin down. Public health is messy like that. Several changes overlap, the number moves, and untangling exactly which lever did what is genuinely hard.
Smoking Stayed Down While This Happened
One worry that has hung over vaping from the start is that it would become a gateway, pulling a new generation toward cigarettes. The data has not played out that way. Daily smoking among Year 10 students stayed at a record low through the whole vaping wave.
That does not settle every debate. Researchers and analysts at the NZ Drug Foundation and elsewhere are careful to point out that vaping is not harmless, and that a decline is not the same as a non-problem. Being less bad than cigarettes is a low bar.
But the specific fear, that vaping would rebuild the smoking habit it was meant to replace, has not shown up in the numbers. Both lines went down together. For a generation that grew up being told smoking was the enemy, that is the heritage worth holding onto.
How to Read the Next Headline
Ask Where the Number Came From
Vaping stats will keep landing in your feed, and most of them will be missing the context that makes them mean anything. A few quick questions sort the useful from the noise.
Who collected it, and how many people did they ask. A claim built on a survey of thirty thousand students is a different animal from one built on a quick online poll. Then check the definition: regular or daily, those are different numbers and they get swapped around constantly. And check the year, because a stat from peak vape in 2022 tells you nothing about now.
None of that requires a stats degree. It is just the habit of not taking a number at face value because it confirms what you already thought. The same scepticism that makes you suspicious of a lecture should make you suspicious of a scary headline.
Where to Go If You Want to Stop
If reading all this has nudged you toward wanting to stop, that is your call and there is no sermon coming. The practical bit is just that you do not have to white-knuckle it alone if you would rather not. Quitline is free, it covers vaping as well as smoking, and you can text or call without anyone making it a big deal. A GP can help too.
Worth saying plainly: slipping up is not failing. Most people who stop for good have a few goes at it first, and that is normal rather than a character flaw. The data we have been talking about is just the sum of a lot of individual decisions, made and unmade and made again.
That is the whole point of looking at the numbers honestly. Not to scare anyone, and not to congratulate anyone. Just to know where things actually stand, and to make your own call from there.
The picture is better than the panic suggested, uneven in ways that matter, and ultimately just a count of choices made by a lot of individual people. Knowing the real numbers will not make any decision for you. It just means that when the next alarming headline lands in your feed, you will have something solid to weigh it against.
2 Comments
The bit about an average hiding a lot is so true. Our school nurse said our area is way higher than the national number and you would never guess that from the headlines. Good to see it actually spelled out instead of glossed over.
Appreciate that you didn’t go full scare-tactics with it. The point about a number not being a verdict on you landed. I quit last year and the line about most people having a few goes first is dead on.