The Limits and Risks of Overstating the OurFutures Vaping Study

Alan Gor 30 July 2025

The OurFutures Vaping trial has been promoted as a breakthrough in preventing youth e-cigarette use. However, a closer reading reveals methodological, contextual, and interpretive limitations that caution against drawing sweeping conclusions, especially those used to justify restrictive policies that may unintentionally harm youth by pushing them toward more dangerous alternatives like cigarettes.

1. Modest Absolute Impact, Inflated Framing

The headline claim is a 65% reduction in odds of e-cigarette use (OR 0.35) at 12 months. This sounds impressive until we remember that odds ratios can exaggerate perceived effect sizes, especially when the baseline prevalence is low. Without clear absolute risk reduction figures, it’s difficult to know the real-world magnitude of impact.

For example:

• If 4% of students in the control group vaped and 1.5% in the intervention group did, that would yield a similar odds ratio but only a 2.5 percentage point absolute reduction — arguably minor in population health terms.

The study also failed to show a sustained reduction in past 30-day (current) use, which is far more relevant from a public health perspective than any experimentation over the previous year.

2. No Evidence the Programme Reduces Smoking

The programme is narrowly focused on preventing vaping, yet vaping and smoking are closely linked behaviours, especially among adolescents. Without measuring smoking uptake or dual use, the study provides no evidence that it reduces overall nicotine use and may even risk unintended substitution back to smoking.

This is particularly concerning given recent data from Roy Morgan (2025) and AIHW (2023), showing increased youth smoking following harsh vape crackdowns. Preventing vaping without offering safer, regulated alternatives could lead students to experiment with combustible tobacco instead.

3. Gaps in Real-World Relevance

This was a highly controlled trial with intensive implementation support. The real world is not a tightly managed research environment. The following challenges limit generalisability:

• High school dropout/attrition: 9 of 49 schools (18%) dropped out before baseline, raising concerns about retention and scalability.

• Optional teacher activities: In many under-resourced schools, these would likely be skipped.

• Digital reliance: Not all students or schools have reliable access to online infrastructure, especially in lower-income or rural areas.

In short, what works in a trial may fail in the messy reality of public education systems.

4. Ignoring Broader Structural Drivers

While the programme aims to reduce demand, it ignores the broader supply and structural environment in which youth access vapes — namely:

• The black market, thriving due to prohibition.

• The loss of age-gating that comes with a regulated market.

• The influence of fear-based messaging, which may backfire by piquing curiosity.

There’s no recognition of how current public health messaging demonising vaping may reduce trust in harm reduction strategies and push adolescents toward rebellion or risk-taking, something well documented in the literature on drug education.

5. Overreliance on Gateway Framing, Weak Evidence

The study frames vaping as a gateway to smoking, but admits this effect is mixed at the population level. Indeed, national and international data often show that as youth vaping increases, youth smoking declines, a likely sign of substitution, not causation.

Even the cited retrospective cohort studies can’t fully control for common liability — the idea that kids who vape and smoke were already predisposed to try both.

The Roy Morgan and AIHW data from Australia contradict the idea that vaping increases youth smoking. If anything, the sharpest youth smoking increase came after Australia began cracking down on vaping in late 2023, not during the rise of vaping.

6. Ethical and Practical Trade-offs

This programme was built around a “harm minimisation” ethos, yet its application leans toward abstinence-only messaging. There is no acknowledgement that:

• Some youth already vape to avoid smoking.

• Some may use vapes experimentally without progressing to dependence.

• Overly alarmist messaging about vaping may undermine honest education about relative risks, or backfire if young people perceive it as propaganda.

Instead of encouraging open, fact-based discussions, this study may embolden policymakers to double down on prohibition and scare tactics, ignoring the complex realities of youth behaviour.

Conclusion

The OurFutures Vaping programme may be a helpful piece of a broader prevention strategy, but it is far from the silver bullet it’s being portrayed as. Its effect size is unclear, it lacks outcome data on smoking, and it exists within a broader policy framework that may be driving up smoking rates by pushing vapes underground.

In an environment where smoking rates are rising among young people for the first time in decades, it is reckless to focus exclusively on preventing vaping without acknowledging its role as a harm reduction tool, especially when done under the guise of evidence-based education.

We need honest, balanced, and youth-informed approaches, not research used as window dressing for punitive policies that could make things worse.