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In 2013, the European market for nicotine replacement therapy (nicotine patches, lozenges, pills and such) dropped by 7%. This brought it below 100 million euros (about $135 million US) which fell below where the industry had been since 2010 and a smidgen below believed sales of electronic cigarettes for the year. No wonder pharmaceuticals companies are so worried about the electronic cigarette market.

There’s no official market research connecting the two, but it looks very likely that electronic cigarettes played a role in the decline of the nicotine replacement market. The massive growth of electronic cigarettes in Europe seems like it couldn’t happen without adversely affecting both tobacco cigarette and smoking cessation markets.

You can read more about the decline (in French) here.

Pharmaceuticals companies have been involved in electronic cigarette debates since the products entered the scene. Even when not directly involved, many of the professional experts weighing in on the subject are often paid consultants of major companies like Glaxosmithkline and Johnson & Johnson. This often raises the question of whether these individuals have conflicts of interest that they are not announcing because they can reasonably argue that pharma and e-cigs don’t intersect (even though they really do).

Pharmaceuticals companies have been making a killing offering minimally successful cessation options to smokers for decades. The best they can offer is around a 3% better success rate than simply trying to quit cold turkey — and yet, long term studies are finding that around 99% of former smokers eventually return to smoking because the addiction never really goes away.

But then, the money has always been in helping people attempt to quit over and over rather than helping them actually quit. Many smokers report having spent tens of thousands of dollars in the last decade alone just attempting (unsuccessfully) to quit. If these people successfully quit their first try, that’s a lot of money that these companies wouldn’t be making.

Now electronic cigarettes have entered the scene and — without all the baggage of claiming to be a therapy — they offer a way to step away from smoking, still maintain the same habits, and cut the harm done by around 99%. A study even found that although quit rates between e-cig and nicotine patch users were essentially the same, individuals that used electronic cigarettes but didn’t quit smoking did manage to substantially cut their total tobacco cigarette consumption. This equates to a significant reduction in the harm smoking does to these individuals and makes electronic cigarettes arguably far better than nicotine patches.

As people get more wise to the cessation racket (as they have been) and more up to date on electronic cigarettes, it seems likely smokers will continue to choose e-cigs first and the traditional quit methods never.