No scare tactics, no lecture. Move the sliders, get a straight-up score for what your habits actually add up to, then dare a mate to check theirs.
The plot twist most people miss: cutting back doesn't cut your risk by the same amount. Doing it half the year isn't "half the risk" of year-round, the gap is way smaller than that. And mixing smoking or vaping with drinking doesn't just add the two risks together, it multiplies them.
1 standard drink = 14g pure alcohol (beer, wine, or a shot of spirits. The type doesn't matter much; the ethanol does).
How your combined risk compares to simply adding the two separate risks together.
Solid: your pattern. Dashed: same daily amounts, all year.
That's roughly how long after your last cigarette your heart rate and blood pressure start dropping back toward normal. Your body doesn't wait around to start fixing things.
US Surgeon GeneralNicotine hits your brain in about ten seconds, faster than a shot through an IV. That speed is exactly why it grabs hold so hard and won't let go.
National Institute on Drug AbuseHeavy smoking and heavy drinking together push mouth and throat cancer risk to around 35 times someone who does neither. They don't add up, they multiply.
Jun et al., J Korean Med Sci 2024Quit before about 40 and you dodge roughly 90% of the long-term risk of dying early from smoking. When you stop matters way more than most people think.
Jha et al., New England Journal of Medicine 2013There's no amount of alcohol that's been shown to be safe when it comes to cancer risk. Even light, regular drinking nudges the odds up a little.
WHO 2023 · US Surgeon General 2025Vape clouds aren't "just water." The aerosol carries ultrafine particles and trace metals that ride deep into your lungs, which is why the sliders here aren't zero.
National Academies of Sciences, 2018This is Quitting (by Truth Initiative) is built specifically for under-25s quitting vaping or smoking. Free, all over text, zero lectures.
Text DITCHVAPE to 88709 →No tobacco, vape, or alcohol money funds this. Ever. That's the whole point. If it was useful, a one-time tip keeps it online and ad-light.
Support this project →Placeholder link. Wire up to your Ko-fi / Buy Me a Coffee / Stripe Payment Link.
No selling your inputs. No targeted ads based on what you tell it. Display ads here are brand-safe, non-endemic, and category-blocked from alcohol and age-restricted products, configured at the ad-network level, not just promised in copy.
Vaping is modeled with its own dedicated curves, not just a scaled-down cigarette curve, built from two separate evidence bases:
The often-repeated "e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than smoking" figure traces to a 2014 UK expert-panel opinion exercise (not data-driven), popularized by a 2015 Public Health England report, and criticized in The Lancet for methodological weakness and conflicts of interest. This tool does not use that figure as a modeling input.
For cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract (mouth, throat, voice box, esophagus), alcohol acts partly as a solvent: it helps dissolve carcinogens and makes it easier for them to penetrate the cells lining the mouth and throat. The U.S. National Cancer Institute describes the combined harm at these sites as multiplicative. A 2024 meta-analysis (Jun et al., J Korean Med Sci) measured this directly for cigarettes and alcohol: heavy alcohol combined with heavy smoking produced roughly 35–39× the risk of neither. This tool's multiplicative model reproduces those figures within roughly 1–7%.
For vaping combined with alcohol, no equivalent study exists. This tool extends the same multiplicative mechanism to vaping as a projection, labeled as such wherever it appears.
| Cancer type | Smoking ceiling | Alcohol ceiling (6 drinks/day) | Notes |
|---|
"Smoking ceiling" is the relative risk approached at high cumulative pack-years for combustible cigarettes. For larynx, pharynx, oral cavity, and esophagus, the ceiling is scaled up from Gandini et al.'s pooled "current smoker" average by ~2.8×, the ratio separating lung cancer's population-average smoker risk from its long-term-heavy-smoker risk. That's what allows the multiplicative combination to match the JKMS heavy+heavy figures above.
| Product | Cancer multiplier | Cardiovascular model |
|---|---|---|
| Regular / light / menthol cigarettes | 1.0× | Standard cigarette dose-response curve |
| IQOS / heated tobacco | 0.85× | Standard cigarette curve, scaled 0.85× (FDA: exposure-reduction claim allowed, disease-risk claim barred) |
| Vaping (e-cigarettes) | ~0.10× (projected) | Dedicated curve anchored to pooled meta-analytic e-cig CVD odds ratios (~1.3-1.5) |
Alcohol's relationship to cardiovascular disease is genuinely contested science: some studies suggest lower risk at moderate intake, and more recent reviews dispute this. Rather than take a side, this tool models heart disease and stroke from tobacco/vaping only.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Public Health Consequences of E-Cigarettes, 2018 · Bhatta & Glantz, J Am Heart Assoc 2019 · e-cigarette CVD network meta-analysis, 2025 · Plurphanswat, Selya & Rodu, Cureus 2024 · CDC EVALI outbreak reports, 2019–2020 · NNAL biomarker studies, PATH / Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention 2025 · Public Health England 2015 review & The Lancet's critique · Jun S et al., J Korean Med Sci 2024;39(22):e185 · Gandini S et al., Int J Cancer 2008 · Cumberbatch MG et al., Eur Urol 2016 · U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory, Alcohol and Cancer Risk, 2025 · National Cancer Institute Alcohol and Cancer Risk Fact Sheet · Bagnardi V et al., Br J Cancer 2015 · Peters SAE et al., BMJ 2018 · NCI Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph 13 · FDA Modified Risk Tobacco Product orders for IQOS.