🚬 Smoking in front of a ‘No Smoking’ sign? Dua Lipa's March 2025 photos are a striking example of how cigarettes appear in celebrity culture. ASH Wales' research found no identified tobacco partnership. So when does smoking become part of the aesthetic, and why does that matter?
More than half of Welsh adults who have heard of vapes wrongly believe vaping is as harmful as smoking or worse, new ASH Wales YouGov findings show.
A new UK excise duty on vaping products starts today, 1 October 2026. Here is what the £2.20 per 10ml duty, new vape duty stamps and higher tobacco duty mean in Wales.
The full ASH Wales Annual Adult Population Survey 2026 is now live, with new Wales evidence on smoking, vaping, quitting, inequalities and public attitudes.
New 2025 SHRN data shows regular vaping and smoking have fallen among secondary school learners in Wales. We look at the latest figures, what they mean and why prevention work still matters.
What does peer pressure look like? Sometimes it is obvious. Sometimes it looks more like a joke, a …
Young People & Prevention / Our track record
Young people and prevention are not a new strand of ASH Wales’s work. We have spent years working directly with young people, schools, youth professionals and partners across Wales – from stop-smoking support and outreach to national youth research, prevention resources and emerging-product monitoring.
Last reviewed: 27th September 2026
That history helps us spot recurring issues, understand how products and pressures change, and build support that reflects what young people and professionals are actually seeing.
young people engaged by The Filter over five years.
events where The Filter engaged directly with young people.
youth-work professionals trained through The Filter.
These are historical programme figures from ASH Wales records. They describe delivery and reach, not proof that one programme caused population smoking rates to fall.
ASH Wales ran a dedicated youth stop-smoking and prevention project focused on teenagers, including harder-to-reach communities. The programme combined direct engagement, out-of-school workshops, professional training and cessation support.
ASH Wales continued to gather direct evidence from young people about smoking, vaping, access, products and influence. More recent youth survey work engaged over 12,000 young people on their vaping experiences and informed Public Health Wales’s Incident Response Group.
Our work expanded into school and youth-setting resources, webinars, staff guidance, smoke-free school activity and practical materials for conversations about smoking, vaping and nicotine.
Nicofiends brings current prevention work together around products, pressure, feelings, marketing and access – helping young people notice what is influencing them before nicotine use becomes established.
ASH Wales now combines research, public-health intelligence, regulation and frontline signals to track new nicotine and vape products without mistaking isolated reports for prevalence.
We bring current Welsh prevalence data, ASH Wales research and wider evidence together, clearly separating Wales findings from GB or international evidence.
Young people’s experiences can show us where language, access, products and pressures are changing. Youth voice can identify questions and signals – it should not be turned into a prevalence estimate unless the research design supports that.
Knowledge matters, but so do confidence, social norms, media literacy, access, stress, product appeal and the ability to handle pressure.
A prevention programme still needs a route for young people who already smoke, vape or use nicotine. They need useful support, not a message that they have failed.
A product in a school, a seizure, a social-media trend or a testing result can tell us what to investigate. It does not automatically tell us how common that behaviour is across Wales.
Today, ASH Wales’s youth prevention work spans evidence, education, support and early warning. The aim is not to create fear around every new product. It is to give young people and the adults around them clear information early enough to act sensibly.
The Filter figures on this page come from ASH Wales’s archived programme records. The project ran from 2013 to 2018. Historical reach figures are presented as evidence of programme delivery and experience, not as an evaluation claim about population-level impact.
The more recent figure of over 12,000 young people surveyed comes from ASH Wales programme records describing youth vaping research that informed Public Health Wales’s Incident Response Group.