Omar ‘Crispy’ Avila tried smoking a couple of times as a teen, but he didn’t like it. But when he joined the Army after high school, it seemed like he was ‘smoking and joking’ with his fellow infantrymen overnight.
“I was so focused on sports in high school that I didn’t really care for it. But after joining the military, I think the training goes hand in hand with nicotine and caffeine,” Avila said. “I just kind of picked it up and smoked ever since I was in — drinking a lot of coffee and smoking cigarettes to stay awake, especially during night missions.”
Now, Avila is part of a group advocating for a new messaging campaign called “Smokeless Vets.” The group includes Black Rifle Coffee Company owner Jarred Taylor as a spokesperson and believes that traditional cessation programs ignore benefits of alternative nicotine products. The group says it wants to help 100,000 veterans quit smoking by 2035.
At the heart of the Smokeless Vets message is a belief that quit-smoking programs offered to veterans by the Department of Veterans Affairs handicap themselves by focusing on nicotine replacement. VA-approved quit-smoking programs on Smokefree.gov endorses Nicotine Replacement Therapy, or NRT, which includes nicotine gum, lozenges and other methods for smokers to get a nicotine dose without tobacco.
But Avila and Smokeless Vets say that traditional NRT and the VA ignore products that deliver nicotine like vapes and chewing tobacco or gum, at the expense of veterans. Nicotine is the primary addictive substance in smoking and comes with well-established health risks. But traditional smoking is what Avila and his group believe, is much more harmful, making the use of nicotine alternatives a reasonable path to quit cigarettes.
“Many of these veterans have tried to quit smoking but were unsuccessful, and [the VA] refused to inform them on all of the pathways to quitting. Failing to authorize innovative products and even misleading veterans on alternative nicotine products,” Taylor said in a video on the group’s website. “E-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than normal cigarettes, yet the VA is making claims that e-cigarettes and vapes are causing cancer.”
A spokesperson for the VA said that the agency endorses extensive quit-smoking programs that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
“The VA offers Veterans U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved pharmacotherapy and evidence-based behavioral interventions for tobacco use treatment,” a VA spokesperson told Task & Purpose in response to issues raised by Smokeless Vets. “To date, FDA has not approved any e-cigarettes, vape pens, or alternative nicotine products for medical use. There are no clinical practice recommendations in the United States that recommend e-cigarettes or alternative nicotine products as a smoking cessation treatment.”
Smokeless Vets counters that several overseas studies have found that smokers fair better at quitting with tobacco products like vapes, nicotine pouches, and nicotine gum. A 2015 English study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, found that “e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than tobacco, and that when supported by a smoking cessation service they help most smokers quit tobacco altogether.”
Another study-of-studies updated this year in the Cochrane Library covering 88 studies and 27,000 participants, found “there is high certainty that nicotine electronic cigarettes increases quit rates compared to nicotine replacement therapy. In absolute terms, this might translate to an additional four quitters per 100.”
Most studies find that less than 10 of every 100 would-be quitters manage to fully kick smoking, with those who try “cold turkey” with no replacement or therapy plans fair worst. “People are more likely to stop smoking for at least six months using nicotine e‐cigarettes than using nicotine replacement therapy,” the study found.
A combat wake up
Avila had a wake-up call about the harmful side effects of cigarettes while recovering from a massive improvised explosive device that blew up his HMMWV in Iraq in 2006.
“When I was in, I didn’t have the need that I wanted to kick smoking; I feel like this is kind of what you do,” Avila said. “But after being wounded, and the doctors asked if I was still smoking, and I was like, ‘yeah,’ they said you need to kind of stop that, man.”
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So began his journey to quit smoking after ten years of indulging in the addiction. Avila had watched many of his fellow infantrymen try to quit and fail because smoking was the least of their concerns when deploying at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When Avila made up his mind to quit smoking, he tried the initial recommendations from the VA. Still, none of them worked for him, and he decided to switch to smokeless tobacco, Red Man tobacco specifically. But that didn’t last, and he switched to vape pens, then nicotine salt pouches.
The last product he used to quit was nicotine gum, which he used sparingly as his nicotine cravings had significantly subsided. Avila, from start to finish, took four months to kick his smoking habit.
“It was numerous things that I went through but got to a point where I was like, ‘Alright, cool, I’m good. I don’t need this gum. I don’t need anything else,’” Avila said. “And then that was that.”
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