Heated tobacco products and nomenclature with Katie East

Addiction Audio

In this episode, Dr Katherine East talks about her recent article on heated tobacco product use. When conducting this research, Katie talked to former and current smokers who use IQOS to understand the words they use to describe themselves and what they do in relation to heated tobacco products.

Katie and Rob then talk about how the language can reflect identity and how this can influence the risk of people relapsing to smoking or other forms of nicotine use. They discuss the importance of social norms and how language can play a substantial role in shaping those norms.

Katie explains why some potential words that might have been used have since been discarded, including “heaters” and “IQOSers”.

They also talk about different social circumstances and how heated tobacco use, vaping and smoking identities interact.

Link to Katie’s previous podcast

“Lots of people refer to it as smoking still…. It also means less having to explain what it is because very few people have heard of IQOS”

“The way that people refer to things and they way they think about themselves as product users can influence their behaviour.”

“Whilst people referred to IQOS use as smoking they were very resistant to being identified as a smoker”.

Original article: ‘It's not what you'd term normal smoking’: a qualitative exploration of language used to describe heated tobacco product use and associated user identity by Katherine East and colleagues. Published in Addiction (2022).

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