STATE spending on traditional smoking cures for medical card holders have shot up by almost 10% to nearly €10million a year.
News of the splurge comes as the increasingly popular, but controversial, vaping alternatives for helping smokers quit show similar results for half the price.
Most of the money goes towards paying for the treatments and therapies for people on medical cards trying to stub out cigs.
Vaping advocates have criticised the Government for “shovelling” money into pricier treatments that are not as effective as vaping.
But charities like the Irish Heart Foundation still believe it is money well-spent because it gets people to quit.
The latest figures on smoking cessation treatments paid for by the taxpayer from the HSE revealed that there was €9.2million spent in 2019.
This is up €700,000 from 2018.
In the meantime, HIQA (Health Information and Quality Authority) estimates that every quit attempt using the treatment varenicline costs €180.18 - almost twice the cost of using vaping to quit, which is estimated by HIQA at €93.80.
Combination NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapy) using an NRT patch and gum costs more than double vaping, at €197.15.
That means that for every 1,000 smokers who quit using vaping rather than combination NRT, there would be a cost saving of over €100,000.
And so for every 10,000 quitters who used vaping rather than combination NRT, there would be a cost saving of over €1million.
Gary Kavanagh, Director of the pro-vaping Edmund Burke Institute, said: “In Ireland we know that 4 in 10 of those who successfully quit smoking used vaping, with another 4 in 10 quitting through willpower alone.
“Vaping is simply more successful at helping people to stop smoking than anything else on the market, and we refuse to use it.
“Instead we continue to shovel money into treatments which the vast majority of smokers do not use.
“We have in vaping the incredibly rare situation where the best technology, from the view of getting people to stop smoking, is also the most cost-effective one.
“If the HSE moved to endorse vaping as a means of quitting smoking they would save millions of euro, increase the effectiveness of their programs, help more people quit smoking, and move the country closer to being ‘tobacco free’ by 2025 , all of which would seem to be things we should be supporting.”
As it stands, the current smoking rate in Ireland is 17% and is still a long way off the Tobacco Free Ireland target of 5% by 2025.
