In recent statements from the European Commission, and most starkly in a written reply by Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi to a parliamentary question from MEP Kristoffer Storm, it is not only the original public health logic that has been quietly abandoned. It is also any meaningful commitment to factual integrity, proportionality, and open, good faith debate.
For decades, European tobacco policy rested on a simple and defensible premise: reduce harm, reduce disease, reduce death. Combustion was correctly identified as the primary driver of smoking related disease, and public health advanced by driving smoking rates down through evidence-based regulation, taxation, and education. The objectives were coherent and the underlying logic was clear. Today, something has shifted.
Proportionality, normally a cornerstone and a legal requirement of EU regulation, has all but disappeared. Nuance has been replaced by slogans. All nicotine use is increasingly treated as morally and medically equivalent to smoking, regardless of delivery mechanism or exposure profile.
The Commission’s reply to MEP Storm exemplifies this shift. It relies on an astonishingly weak chain of assumptions, presents speculative claims as settled science, selectively deploys data, and consistently avoids the central question of comparative risk. Entire categories of evidence are ignored. Differences in magnitude are erased. Product specific realities, particularly for nicotine pouches, are not merely misunderstood but dismissed without analysis.
What emerges is not a public health argument, but a narrative engineered to fit a predetermined conclusion: that all nicotine must be regulated as if it were smoking, irrespective of toxicology, exposure, or real-world outcomes. When this type of reasoning appears at the highest levels of EU governance, it is no longer merely disappointing. It is alarming.
When asked whether smoke free tobacco and nicotine products contribute to the reduction of smoking rates in the EU, the Commission instead congratulates itself, asserting that the entire decline in smoking is attributable to tobacco control directives. No evidence is offered, no alternative explanations are considered, and no counterfactual is explored. This omission is particularly striking given that countries with a long-standing use of oral nicotine products consistently show far better smoking outcomes. Sweden, explicitly referenced in the question, has the lowest prevalence of daily smokers in the EU despite only a moderate score on the Tobacco Control Scale. At the same time, other countries with similar tobacco control scores but no tradition of oral nicotine use show smoking prevalence several times higher. This discrepancy is neither acknowledged nor explained[1].
The reply then deteriorates further. The Commission asserts that using smoke free nicotine products does not reduce health risk. This is not a cautious or conservative interpretation of the evidence. It is a rejection of the scientific consensus that has guided tobacco control for decades. The foundational principle of tobacco science is that combustion is the dominant driver of smoking related disease. Removing combustion reduces exposure to toxicants and therefore reduces risk. Denying this is to deny the core mechanism on which modern tobacco epidemiology is built.
Well established bodies such as the Royal College of Physicians, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, among many others, have explicitly concluded that noncombustible nicotine products expose users to substantially lower levels of harmful substances than cigarettes. None of these organizations claim that such products are safe. But not safe is the lowest possible threshold for acknowledging risk. It says nothing about magnitude. Not safer is a fundamentally different claim. It implies that there is no meaningful difference in risk between the most dangerous nicotine products ever created and the least hazardous ways of consuming nicotine.
This is where the Commission’s reasoning completely collapses again. Products with radically different exposure profiles are treated as interchangeable, while entire categories are blurred or erased through generalization. Nicotine pouches, which involve no combustion, no inhalation, no ingestion, no carcinogens, no heating, combustion or other process altering the content when used, are not assessed on their own terms at all but are implicitly folded into arguments and speculations about vaping. Vaping itself is widely acknowledged to be substantially less harmful than smoking yet is dismissed based on hypothetical behavioral risks such as addiction that might lead to a possible transition to smoking. It should be mentioned that smoking in Sweden for the age bracket 16-29 has declined to a third since (2,3%) the introduction of nicotine pouches. Where are all the smokers from the gateway?
In this logic, a well-documented, high mortality exposure is placed on the same level as a speculative risk pathway, and the two are declared equally dangerous.
No mechanism is offered to explain how removing combustion fails to reduce harm. No comparative exposure data are presented. No proportionality is applied. Instead, the conclusion appears fixed in advance: all nicotine use must be treated as if it were smoking. This is not evidence based public health. It is risk denial by assertion, achieved by collapsing not safe into not safer and substituting speculation for scientific comparison.
The reply the commission provides to MEP Storms question is so fundamentally flawed that it should be withdrawn immediately. It abandons proportionality, misrepresents established science, and substitutes assertion for analysis. Left uncorrected, it does more than weaken a single argument. It undermines all confidence in the Commission’s ability to distinguish evidence based public health from ideological positioning.
If the Commission nevertheless chooses to maintain its position, it must meet a minimum standard of credibility.
First, it must clearly identify the authoritative scientific assessments on which it relies to claim that smoke free nicotine products do not meaningfully reduce health risk compared to cigarettes and explain how those assessments support that conclusion in comparative terms.
Second, it must explain how its position can be reconciled with the well-established understanding that combustion is the dominant driver of smoking related harm, and on what scientific basis the removal of combustion would not be expected to reduce risk.
Third, it must account for real world outcomes. If declining smoking rates are primarily attributed to tobacco control directives, the Commission must explain why countries with similar levels of tobacco control show radically different smoking prevalence, and in particular why Sweden achieves the lowest rate of daily smokers in the European Union despite only a moderate tobacco control score, while countries with comparable scores but no oral nicotine alternatives perform dramatically worse.
Forth, where are all the smokers from the gateways when all statistics show that the movement of users go from cigarettes to lower risk alternatives.
We suspect this will not happen because it would require a black swan kind of paradigm shift on several different but related issues but if the commission delivers we promise to keep our readers updated.
Finally, we have not even mentioned the absence of second hand smoke, which in itself represents a far greater public health threat than nicotine pouches. Cigarettes expose others to a well documented risk, accounting for tens of thousands of deaths in the EU each year. On this single criterion alone, it should be embarrassingly clear how absurd the comparison is.
Until these questions are answered, the Commission’s position cannot be regarded as a serious public health assessment. It remains what it currently appears to be: a conclusion reached first and justified afterwards.
Question for written answer by MEP Storm can be found here
Answer given by Mr Várhelyi on behalf of the European Commission
[1] A comparison based on the Tobacco Control Scale (TCS) 2021 shows that Sweden (49 points) has essentially the same level of tobacco-control policy as Croatia (49) and Latvia (48), yet markedly different outcomes. Daily smoking prevalence is approximately 6.4% in Sweden, compared with around 22% in Croatia and Latvia (Eurostat/EHIS). This demonstrates that similar TCS scores do not necessarily translate into similar smoking prevalence.