Young People Quit Vaping Far More Often on a Pill Long Used for Smoking

CATEGORY: DISEASE PREVENTION

Plenty of young people want to stop vaping and find they can’t. In a Boston trial of 261 teens and young adults, a pill long prescribed to help smokers quit got 51% of them off nicotine vapes by the end of treatment, compared with 14% on placebo.¹ The pill was varenicline, and every claimed quit was checked with a saliva test, not taken on anyone’s word.

Three Routes to Quitting, Tested Head to Head

Participants were 16 to 25 years old, vaped nicotine daily or nearly so, and didn’t smoke cigarettes. Each got one of three programs for 12 weeks. One group took varenicline along with brief weekly counseling and a free text-message support service. A second group got identical-looking placebo pills plus the same counseling and texts. A third got the text service alone. Who received the real pills was decided by lot. The gaps were wide. Verified quit rates at the end of treatment ran 51% with varenicline, 14% with placebo, and 6% with texts alone. Six months in, with no more pills, the groups held at 28%, 7%, and 4%.¹

An Old Tool Aimed at a New Habit

Varenicline has been approved for adult smoking cessation for nearly two decades. It eases withdrawal by gently stimulating the brain’s nicotine receptors while blocking nicotine itself from docking there. A borrowed key fits the lock, but turns it only partway. The surprise here is how well that carried over to vaping, and in people this young. The drug was well tolerated. Two people on varenicline and one on placebo stopped over side effects, and none of the successful quitters switched to cigarettes. Counseling plus placebo barely beat texts alone, which suggests the medication, not just the attention, did the heavy lifting.

Key Takeaways

• Varenicline more than tripled verified quitting among 16-to-25-year-olds who vaped nicotine, 51% versus 14% at the end of treatment, and the advantage persisted months after the pills stopped.
• The drug is FDA-approved for adult smoking cessation. Using it for vaping in people under 18 goes beyond its current label, which makes this trial’s evidence the main guide for now.
• Support texts and counseling alone helped very few participants quit, a sobering baseline for the approach most quit programs rely on.

References

1. Evins AE, Cather C, Reeder HT, et al. Varenicline for Youth Nicotine Vaping Cessation: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2025;e253810. link