Japan's Public Health Transformation Due To THR

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We already knew that Japan has experienced a huge reduction in cigarette sales over the past several years. We now have more evidence, looking beyond sales, on the smoking cessation rates in the country. A government-run, household-sampled, nationally representative survey that has been tracking substance use since 1995, now shows exactly the substitution pattern that we were hoping for.

Mizuno S et al. published the analysis in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences Reports (2026;5:e70409), using Japan’s Nationwide General Population Survey on Drug Use — 16,499 people, five survey waves between 2017 and 2025, stratified two-stage probability sampling. The headline: cigarette smoking fell from 20.7% to 12.3%, a 40% relative decline, while heated tobacco product (HTP) use rose from 5.3% to 11.7% over the same eight years. That’s a genuine restructuring of how a country of 125 million people consumes nicotine.

Survey Data on Farsalinos

Japan's Public Health Transformation Due To THR