What a New Vaping-Cessation Study Confirms About Peer Support

A study published this month in the journal Substance Use analyzed data from a 12-week randomized controlled trial of 280 adolescents and young adults, ages 16 to 25, who were attempting to quit vaping nicotine. Researchers led by Meghan A. Costello, with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, tracked participants for three months after their quit attempt to see what predicted whether they actually stayed vape-free.

One factor stood out above almost everything else: how much a participant's closest friend vaped. For every one standard-deviation increase in a best friend's vaping frequency, a participant was 76% less likely to maintain biochemically verified abstinence at the three-month mark. Heavier vaping among close friends also predicted fewer counseling sessions attended and weaker adherence to cessation medication over the course of treatment.

The authors' conclusion was straightforward: peer social networks deserve as much attention as individual motivation when designing interventions to help someone quit. Programs that focus only on the person trying to quit, without addressing who they're surrounded by, may be missing the more powerful variable.

At The Zone, we didn't need a study to tell us that environment shapes recovery — but it's worth pausing on what this one found, because it puts numbers to something our peer recovery coaches see every day.

The people who succeed in quitting — whether it's vaping or a substance use disorder — rarely do it through willpower alone. They do it because the people around them changed too: new friends, new routines, a community pulling in the same direction instead of the opposite one. That's the entire logic behind peer recovery support: a coach who has lived through addiction can help someone build that new environment, relationship by relationship, in a way that individual determination by itself often can't.

This particular study looked at teenagers and young adults quitting nicotine vaping, not adults in recovery from substance use disorders — the population The Zone serves. But the underlying mechanism is the same one we build our work around: a person's social network can make or break a quit attempt, at any age and with any substance. It's also a reminder that prevention and recovery aren't really separate conversations. The same protective effect a supportive peer network offers a teenager trying to put down a vape pen is what DDF works to build, every day, for adults rebuilding their lives after addiction.

Source: Costello, M.A., et al. (2026), “Peer Vaped Nicotine Use in Adolescents and Young Adults: Associations With Abstinence and Intervention Adherence During a Quit Attempt,” Substance Use. doi.org/10.1177/29768357261481840. Summary via Partnership to End Addiction (drugfree.org).