Salisbury 'most determined English city' to stop smoking
More people here are searching for methods to quit than elsewhere in England
Last updated 31st Jan 2024
Quitting smoking is no easy task, but it seems people in Salisbury are among those most committed to the task.
A study by vape retailer Evapo has ranked Salisbury as the highest placed English city when it came to online search terms linked to stopping smoking.
It comes as many people use the start of a new year to embark on the journey to quitting, with searches on the topic rising an average of 68% in the first month of the year.
Salisbury had 208 searches per 10,000 population.
Evapo CEO Andrej Kuttruf told Greatest Hits Radio that vaping has become the most popular method of helping people to kick the habit, saying it's twice as effective as other nicotine replacement therapies.
"The problem with smoking is the combustion of the tobacco and vaping products sidestep that problem (by) heating a liquid, but so it still delivers the nicotine.
"It allows people to, in a way, carry on with their habit. So it's a very similar sensation when they inhale the vapour of the liquid, but it doesn't burn any tobacco. So most of those nasty chemicals are not being released in a vaping product," he said.
And while vaping has "residual risk" it is significantly less harmful than smoking cigarettes.
"Anything you put in your lungs apart from clean air should not really ideally go into your lungs. So our advice always to smoke is is the best thing they can do is to quit completely or to switch completely."
Evapo, who have a store in Salisbury on Blue Boar Row, work closely with local NHS services, including hospitals and quit clinics, to guide people on the path to being free of addiction to nicotine.
They're one of the approved suppliers of e-cigarettes as part of a Government scheme giving a million smokers e-cigarettes for free to help them quit smoking.